


The Uncarrollist

by 0x400



Category: Gulliver's Travels, Original Work, aiw
Genre: Satire, Social Commentary, The story of a modern human in a distant future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:01:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0x400/pseuds/0x400
Summary: Days in North Wonderland seemed to stretch on without end. The sun hung overhead like it was suspended from a string, and he never once saw it set, or saw it rise. But as he sat leaning against the trunk of an old tree, he began to sense for the first time how the sun in the Wonderland sky moved. From where it had filtered down through the treetops before, it glinted in his eyes now from between their branches. Time was becoming tangible - and he could feel it slipping away.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 10





	1. Every fall will come to an end.

notes // i planned to write this for nanowrimo but then my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and i started writing it immediately because he always wanted to read my writing and i didn't want to show him fanfiction... it took half a year before i worked up the courage to post it so, even if you only get through the first paragraph, thank you for reading 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


He climbed the hill with his bouquet, and looked over the edge of the cliff. Waves crashed on the rocks as a cold wind swept the shore. When the sea had calmed again, he let the flowers down, watching as they flitted away and scattered above the shadow in the water.

✻✻✻

He woke up from a long sleep at the tap of rain on his cheek. He could feel the grass between his fingers and the cold on his skin, but his eyes could only see the dark. For a long time, he was unsure of where he was, or if he was awake at all.

"Ha...breathing...s he dead-"

A voice, faint and skipping like a pulse, reached him from somewhere in the distance.

"O...ine he....ust sleeping-"

His eyes cracked open to a pale sky. Pine trees circled around his head, bending and sighing in the wind as the caw of a lone crow echoed around the empty space. They began to chorus from every direction, and he watched in a daze as clusters of black feathers burst from trees and took to the sky. A shadow stretched over his head, blocking out the rain and the light. He blinked at it with bleary eyes until it gradually took the shape of a human face.

"...He's awake!"

The shout gripped his ears. They rang from the shock as the shadow - human, _man_ \- shifted his focus back to him. "Are you alright?" he asked in smaller voice.

There was a sound of hurried footsteps in the grass, and he felt a hand clap around his wrist as another pressed against his back. The trees seemed to tilt and spin as he rose to a sitting position, and found that two other men had now crowded around him. One was older and broader, while the other was slight and young and looked as horrified as he did curious. They were all dressed in dusty overalls, with grass-stains on the knees.

He rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper and looked down at the muddle of broken twigs and branches all around him. Then, tipping his head back, he squinted up at the cloud of white fabric snared in the top of a tree. There was a murmur of overlapping voices, before the cogs in his head slowly ticked into motion, and everything began to feel a bit more real and a bit less like a dream. His voice came out a rasp when at last he asked, "Where am I?"

"The Caterpillar Wood," came the reply.

This odd string of words meant nothing to him. Separately, they all meant something, but together, he couldn't make much sense of it.

"What's that?"

The men stared at him for a moment, then silently exchanged glances.

"...Do you think his head's alright?"

"Maybe he's got amnesia."

"Amnesia...?"

They looked at each other again, much graver now than before. His stomach knotted when they turned their attention back to him.

"Ah... Alright," the older one began. "Let's see now... What year is it?"

"Uh," his face blanked, he lowered his gaze. "...I'm not sure."

The older one rested his hands on his knees and rose to his feet. He shook his head as he started back into the trees. "He's got amnesia, alright. Hatt, take him to the hospital, will you?"

> **[** My name is Swift. **]**

The younger of the three stood up and trailed after him. "Amnesia... What a strange word... Am-ni-zi-ahhhh..." He paused to glance back at Swift, and called to the older one, "Do you think he remembers how to spell _amnesia_?"

"Don't go digging for apples! Who knows if he knew how to spell it in the first place?" he chided. "Leave him be, now. Got enough trouble as it is..."

They vanished into a thicket of trees with their wheelbarrow of saws and clippers, and from their direction soon came the sound of a tree falling.

> **[** I'm 28 years old. I enjoy factoring polynomials, pretending I know a great very many things, and speaking like I was born in the 1600s. My favourite colour is red, and my favourite food is butter. Just butter. **]**

The hand that had been supporting his back gave him a gentle pat.

"Amnesia..." he mused. "That sounds rough."

> **[** And I am _not_ an amnesiac. **]**

He came around to face him, and offered his hand. "Can you stand?"

The answer to that question was just as much a mystery to Swift. It felt as though his legs hadn't been used for days. Taking his hand, he slowly came onto his feet, stumbling a bit as he found his balance. Twigs and dirt rolled off his clothes, and he stared at the dried mud on his hands, wondering to himself how long he'd been lying in the grass.

"Alright," he said to Swift. "Let's go."

There was a moment of silence, and of stillness when Swift curiously looked him in the eyes.

> **[** For the purpose of giving context to the events recorded in this journal, I'll first give a brief history of the events leading up to this point. 
> 
> 2068 A.D. → American scientist Lagado Balnibarbi publishes a paper that utilises Einstein's theory of relativity and Nietsnie's theory of ytivitaler to map a potential guide for a time travelling device.
> 
> 2073 → After five years of heated scientific and congressional debate, a government funded research team sets out to refine Balnibarbi's design and construct the device.
> 
> 2081 → The iDecidusTempus is completed. Because its shape is similar to a boat with wings, it is popularly referred to as simply: _the_ _time ship_. After several devastating test trials, a human is sent on a voyage to the future for the first time in documented history. In the meantime, the country plunges into an unprecedented recession as a result of the tax payer money that was funnelled into this wholly necessary endeavour. Two months later, the voyager returns with news of a disparate world where an unknown disaster has caused humanity to perish, and has left the earth an ashen hellscape. Also, due to the powerful magnetism in its body, the ship returns with an unintentionally stolen Chinese satellite stuck to its side.
> 
> The government tries to hide these revelations, but a whistleblower leaks the news, and global panic spurs the president to marshal troops who will travel meticulously through time in an attempt to pinpoint the date and cause of the disaster, as well as search for signs of future human civilisations. For reasons unknown, each time trip has a 27% chance of blighting the traveller with a fast-acting decay that spreads from the eyes. Troops are therefore drafted from the lowest at-risk group (healthy male adults aged 25 to 28, with 20/20 vision, who have never had a cavity or a sunburn, and whose ancestry is at least 40% Irish and no more than 2% Korean, and who grew up drinking the tap water in Kansas City, specifically). It should be noted here that in fact the risk for this group is merely 0.2% lower, at 26.8%. **]**

He took a step back. "...If we go now, the doctor can probably see you right away."

As he turned to lead the way, Swift grabbed at the end of his sleeve. 

"What's your name?"

He paused and looked over his shoulder. 

"Hatt."

Swift opened and closed his mouth in silence, not unlike a fish. "...Hat?" he echoed. "That's an unusual name, isn't it?"

"Is it?" he puzzled, starting through the clearing. "It's short for Hatter," he added, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. 

Swift stood motionless in the grass as he dwelled on this, before his thoughts flickered back to the present and he hurried after him.

They weaved through patches of tall grass and narrow spaces, and emerged onto a trail that ran up a steep hill. Somewhere at the halfway mark, Swift brought his hands to his knees and hunched over with a loud wheeze. 

Hearing his struggle, Hatt looked over his shoulder, and waited. 

"You alright?"

Swift looked up, muttering between breaths, "Just... one minute..."

> **[** From this point on, events will be paraphrased from a Carrollist history book. It should be noted that years will now be written in the format A.C.B (After Carroll's Birth).
> 
> 285 A.C.B. (2117 A.D.) → A disaster nearly eradicates humanity and renders the earth largely inhabitable. The cause of the disaster is never confirmed, as the only survivors are the 1279 passengers (and pets) aboard the Applelon Plumusk Submarine Hotel, more than six miles under the sea. Many theories are put forth, but later investigations strongly suggest it was the result of nuclear war. Upon returning to an apocalyptic surface, humans begin documenting as much knowledge as they can, believing that what was lost can eventually be recovered if there is record of its existence. Sciences are documented as thoroughly as possible, but still riddled with gaps. There is a focus on mathematics, because they reason that if everything can be explained in numbers, it is the most important system to preserve. Knowledge of the arts is archived in the form of short retellings of famous books, poems, movies, television series, games, in awkward recreations of famous paintings, and in lyrically inaccurate notations of famous compositions. These mediocre summaries are celebrated and revered. By the year 293, much of this knowledge has been preserved on paper, and several libraries have been constructed to protect them. Since electronic devices may fail at any time, and cannot yet be reconstructed, they are not trusted as forms of backup. **]**

He dragged himself upright and willed his feet to move up the hill. Some ways ahead of him, Hatt was already climbing down the other side. As he reached the summit, he paused again to look into the distance, at the space between the trees where the trail tapered off, and where he could see what looked like the curved edge of a rooftop, and where he could hear the sounds of bells as the wind swept the hill. His eyes were wide with wonder as he tore down the trail, leaving Hatt in his dust. 

Dumbfounded, Hatt looked over his shoulder, then back to Swift as he watched him rush ahead. "Oi... Oi! You shouldn't run!" he called, hurrying after him. "You nearly collapsed earlier!"

Deaf to his words, Swift raced to the end of the trail. His shoes left the dirt and touched down on stone, where he stopped again to catch his breath. Stretching before him was a long, narrow street, fenced in by tall cobblestone buildings that didn't leave an inch of space in between. Their roofs were dark and curled at the edges, hung with signs and strung with lights that glowed softly in the daylight. There were shops and cafes and offices, and rows of apartment complexes where every balcony was crowded with clotheslines and potted plants - daffodils, yarrows, sunflowers, cornflowers. More plants in pots filled the empty spaces at the entrances of buildings, where many of the stone walls were cracked and chipped, or shrouded in curling vines like they'd been standing for a hundred years. People bustled about in red and green clothing, as shop employees held up signs outside their doors and shouted down the street about sales and specials. A person on a bike rushed past him like a gust as they swerved the corner into the main street, and pedalled up the arched bridge that connected the town where it was separated by a river. 

A flurry of footsteps came up behind him as Hatt finally caught up, leaning over to catch his breath. He glanced up at Swift, who seemed so oddly mesmerised by the sight.

> **[** 381 → Documented flaws in the history of humanity's first wave have made the second wave wary of repeating their mistakes. As a result, they live in small, tightly-constructed cities where everything is in walking or biking distance, with the exception of the farmlands that extend beyond their borders. Long distances are travelled by boat, and for this reason towns are always built by the sea. Records of the global warming epidemic have also caused an aversion to electricity, and its uses are strictly limited. Chemicals are instead used for things such as lighting, heating, and food preservation. While they see merit in personal computers and handheld devices, the idea of staring at a screen every waking hour of the day is equated to poison, and they have outlawed the recreation of such machines. Their computers, while of great capacity, have very little function, and are utilised only by employed programmers in storage facilities where they back up historical data and government records. These machines are never made available for commercial or business use. Also, for fear of another "great disaster" it is illegal to invent (or conspire to invent) any weapon that can harm more than one person at a time, with the exception of canons equipped to large sea vessels. **]**

Hatt's voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. "Uh, the hospital is this way."

He followed him through clusters of people, some of whom exchanged nods with him as they passed. Here, the smell of baked bread filled the air. A block down, the smell of grilled fish came from the open door of a restaurant. He ducked his head as they walked under low balconies where plants hung from the railings, and found himself having to step over an old man who sat slumped against the door of a shop with tinted windows, half-asleep in a cloud of smoke. He stumbled back when a cat leapt from a rooftop and cut in front of him, scurrying into an open door. He slowed his step to peer into the window of a shop filled with clocks, where the pendulums all swung in perfect unison. Then, he stared again when they passed a bookstore where cover of the book in the window display read: _The Canine at the Door_ , and beneath the title, _Best Selling Thriller!_

Unsettled by how peculiar it all was, he closed the gap between him and Hatt, practicallystepping on his heels when Hatt came to an abrupt halt, and Swift bumped into his back.

"Oh! You alright?" Hatt spun around in surprise. "The entrance is here." He stepped into a building made of grey bricks, and held the door open for him. After a moment's hesitation, Swift followed him inside. 

It was a wide room of stone floors and high ceilings and bright windows. Hatt moved past the wooden benches furnishing the waiting area and went up to the counter, where he spoke to a woman who stood behind a sheet of glass. At a loss for what to do, Swift wandered around the room, looking through windows and reaching out to touch the plants that sat on their sills. Among them, there was a butterfly resting on the leaf of a potted ivy. He watched in silence as it slowly beat its wings. Suddenly rain began to pour into the streets, and the people all raised their mushroom-shaped umbrellas and hurried away. For a moment, he was sure that he was dreaming as he watched giant mushrooms dance down the street. Turning away from the window, he saw Hatt again, sitting on one of the benches in the waiting area. Hatt was very earnest when he met his stare and said, "You know, you can sit on these. They're very sit-able on-able."

Swift deadpanned at this remark, but he supposed he was acting quite strange. Putting on his best _I am perfectly normal and not at all strange_ face, he took a seat on the bench across from Hatt.

> **[** 624 → Humanity has begun to flourish across the coast of Scandinavia, and more recently, the coast of China. They have purposefully spread to either sides of the earth in the event that natural disaster should befall one region. Their motivation lies not so much in the preservation of the human race, but in the preservation of history. Without humans to protect it, learn it, and acknowledge it, four billion years of the earth's history and several millennia of human achievement would amount to nothing but dust. Interestingly, they acknowledge that the earth itself will some day amount to nothing but dust, yet they persevere. **]**

A man in plain white garbs emerged from the hallway, holding a clipboard to his chest. He made his way to the counter and exchanged papers with the woman behind the glass, then returned to the waiting area.

"Next patient, please."

Swift glanced around the empty room, realising that he and Hatt were the only ones there. 

They followed him down the hall to a door marked by a gilded seven, and motioned for them to step inside as he unclipped the papers and left them on the desk. Before Swift could look much around the room, a man in a familiar-looking white coat opened the door. He gave a curt bow and took his seat at the desk. Pulling his glasses out from his pocket, he began to read over the papers, squinting and raising them to his face as he tried to make sense of Hatt's scrawls.

"Which one of you is... 'don't know'?"

Hatt immediately pointed to Swift, who immediately deadpanned again upon hearing this.

"My name is Swift."

Hatt looked more surprised by the revelation than the doctor.

"Oh? You remember your name, then?" the doctor asked, setting down his papers.

"I remember a good many things, actually," he said indignantly.

"Well that's good news," the doctor smiled, patting the empty seat beside his desk.

He felt a bit reluctant to have himself examined for a false reason, but when he considered his options, walking out now could only make things worse, seeing as he had nowhere else to go, and no idea what to do - so he took a seat. 

The doctor began by shining a light in his eye, then in his ears, and up his nose. He felt around his head for any signs of swelling, and tested his reflexes. This all felt very familiar.

"You say you're suffering from amnesia?"

Swift glanced to the side. "Apparently."

The doctor gave a nod. "What kind of things are you having trouble remembering?"

At this, Hatt felt it appropriate to say, "If I may, sir, he probably can't remember the things he's having trouble remembering."

Swift sank into his chair, biting back a loud sigh. The doctor turned to Hatt with a thin smile and adjusted his glasses. "Well, perhaps you can shed some light on this matter, then."

Hatt looked up, then down, then to the side, as if thinking very hard about it. "Well, uh, earlier... he couldn't remember what year it was."

The doctor turned back to Swift, observing him so closely that Swift shrank under his stare. "Can you tell me what month it is?" he asked.

Swift said nothing, and looked down at his lap.

"You say your name is Swift, but is that your first name, or your last?"

Swift curled his hands over his knees.

"Do you remember the year your were born?"

He wondered to himself how mad the doctor would think him if he said he was born "at least a hundred" years in the past. But he was under strict orders not to reveal his identity or his mission should he make contact with future human civilisations. If anyone were to see him as a threat, it could put him in danger, or become an obstacle to the mission's success. 

After a long silence, he mumbled under his breath, "...I remember that I'm 28."

"Ah! That's a start."

The doctor turned to his desk again and scribbled his notes on Swift's papers. "Well," he said, sitting back in his chair. "It's certainly true that you're having some difficulties with your memory, but there don't seem to be any signs of physical trauma to your head. Perhaps, with time, your memories will return to you. More importantly, you're quite pale... and very much underweight. You exhibit signs of one who is malnourished. It should do you some good to get more protein and fruit in your diet."

Swift glanced to the side again, offhandedly thinking that he'd been living on nothing but protein bars for the last two months.

"Thanks, doc," Hatt chimed.

The doctor gave a nod as he stood up from his desk and collected Swift's papers. "I trust I can leave him with you?" At this, Hatt nodded vigorously, as if it were his duty and honour to nod as hard as he could. "Right then," he said as he stepped into the hallway. "Come back and see me if anything should happen."

Swift looked up, and gave a halfhearted nod as Hatt gave a bow. When the door shut, his gaze fell into his lap again, into his hands as he hunched over in the seat, wondering what he should do now. More than anything, he needed to find the time ship, before it was found by anyone else. But even if he were to leave now and begin looking for it, he couldn't go home before he'd learned the time and the cause of the disaster, or before he'd documented the discovery of a post-disaster civilisation. All this time, they'd been staring out of the ship's windows at ashes, at rubble, at burnt corpses and black water. Now that he'd finally found living humans, in a working society, surrounded by clear water and growing trees, he was overwhelmed by the work ahead of him. His task wasn't as easy as running back to the forest and climbing into the ship. And now, having lost his comrades to the time illness, he alone was carrying their hopes, and the hopes of everyone back home. He sank deeper into his chair, buried himself deeper in despair. Then, Hatt's voice cut into his thoughts again.

"Uh, Swift sir-"

Swift looked up.

"You, um, you must be hungry... Should we get something to eat?"

He wondered why Hatt was suddenly so sheepish. He was a good bit taller than Swift, who was pale, underweight, covered in dirt, and who didn't know what year it was. If Hatt was afraid of him, he'd probably shot him one too many glares. Sighing, he tried to soften his expression. But as strange as it was, food was the last thing on his mind now. If anything, he felt more like vomiting than eating.

He lifted his hand off of his knee, and watched it tremble horribly in his attempt to keep it still. However hungry he was or wasn't, food would probably do him some good.

"Alright," he said, standing up from his chair.

For a moment, Hatt looked relieved, and then, _not_ , when Swift suddenly ran to the sink and gripped the sides as he threw up his last meal of protein bars and vitamin shakes. He was stiff as a board when Swift turned around and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and he was covering his mouth to hide a very obvious look of disgust when Swift looked up.

Heaving a sigh, he pushed off from the sink and stood himself upright. "So? What are we eating?"

His disgust faded quickly as he lowered his hand and put it to his chin in thought. A moment later, he lit up. "Oh! I know a great place! With Bunberryburryborn tarts!"

Swift grimaced at the sound of it. _Who could eat a thing with such a ridiculous name,_ he thought.

✻✻✻

Rain pattered on the awning as mushrooms continued to dance down the street - red, brown, white, spotted, flat, round, uneven, and all of them with human legs for stems. They were seated at a table in the outdoor space of a bistro, waiting for their orders. Swift was curiously reading the refreshments menu, to find he didn't know what a single one of these names meant.

_Bildurburn Juice..._

_Poppypun Purkpin Shake..._

_Nippynop Noon Sap..._

_Centrifugal Force Water-_

He sat upright in his chair.

_What is that supposed to be?_

He imagined a bucket of 1 cent tap water being swung around several times, then bottled and sold for 2 dollars each.

_I'd like to try that,_ he thought decidedly.

When the waitress came around to their table, Swift watched in a combination of horror and fascination as she put down a flatbread with clams and blood oranges baked into it, and slid it to Hatt. In front of Swift, she placed a pair of chopsticks, and a plate of what looked a bit like sushi, but rolled with bread instead of seaweed, filled with baked honey-glazed salmon, and topped with shredded cranberries. In between them, she slid a tart that looked something like a pie, but it was flat and its dough was a bright red gradient, like the eeriest sunset. Sugared mint leaves and cucumber shreds decorated the top, and in the middle was a salty, spherical biscuit. She explained that inside was a sort of greenish custard, and eight different types of berries, with the base of the tart being a chocolate-filled cinnamon walnut pancake.

_This must be the awful tart,_ he thought, noting to himself that it looked about as ridiculous as it sounded. But his attention quickly strayed from the tart to the sight of Hatt cutting into his blood orange and shellfish flatbread. After a few seconds of shock and disbelief, and a brief inward monologue where he lamented how regretfully the human race had regressed, Swift made his peace with it. "By the way..." he said. "What year is it?"

Hatt froze. When he got past the absurdity of being asked such a question in earnest, he couldn't help laughing to himself. "It's 919."

Swift blanked. He stared back at Hatt, open-mouthed and lost for words when he realised he had no idea what this number meant. He was sure he'd travelled here from the year 2081. And he was sure that he'd travelled forward, not back. He was also sure that nowhere on earth was human civilisation so advanced by the year 919 on the Gregorian calendar, so Hatt must have been using a different counting system. He was pulled out of his thoughts again when Hatt looked at the tart and said, "How positively luminescent! I bet it's fresh."

Swift puzzled at his remark, glancing down at the tart as he echoed the word, "Luminescent?" 

Hatt looked up in question.

"What does luminescent mean?" Swift clarified. He didn't think _luminescent_ was the right word to describe a tart, but he considered that it may have been slang, or had even taken on an entirely different meaning. His curiosity grew as he waited intently for Hatt to shed light on the matter.

"I'm not sure!" Hatt twinkled. "But it's a nice, grand word to say."

Swift's expression went cold again. _This person is an idiot,_ he thought. He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his chin in his hand, waving a chopstick at Hatt. "I wouldn't use words I don't know the meaning of if I were you," he said, giving him a _look_.

Hatt shrank under his stare, and turned to his plate again with a pout. "I don't think there's anything wrong with it... You sure say some uncarrollist things."

"Uncarrollist?" Swift asked, half wondering if it was a word he'd invented this time.

"Uncarrollist," Hatt reiterated. "As in, _not_ Carrollist."

"Yes, I speak English," Swift muttered. "I've grasped that much."

The sour turn in his mood had frightened Hatt all over again, and he smiled nervously as he cast a glance to the side, twirling his fork in his lap. "I-it must be hard for you, having amnesia and all... It might be easier if you just come to tea."

_Come to tea..._ he wondered, _like, afternoon tea?_

Understanding Hatt when he spoke was an endless uphill battle. He shifted his attention to his plate instead. His food was colourful and varied, but in all the wrong ways, he felt. He tried at first to position the chopsticks between his fingers, managing to pinch them hard enough to keep them from falling, but too hard to move them in any useful way. All the while, Hatt watched him with his lips parted, as if ready to say something, but too afraid to say it. Dropping the chopsticks in defeat, they rolled across the table as he picked up a piece of breaded sushi with his hand, and bit into it. Though he'd braced himself for the worst, he found that it was actually very good.

"In any case," he went on. "Using words you don't know the meaning of is quite problematic."

"What's problematic mean?"

Swift took another bite of his sushi, looked up in thought, and said with the utmost conviction, "It means exactly what you want it to mean."

Hatt cut another piece out of his flatbread, and held it up. "This bread is wonderfully problemati-"

_"No."_

As he lifted another piece of sushi, his gaze wandered to the tart in the middle of the table.

> **[** Though it may seem insignificant in this timeline of events, I assure you it is of the greatest importance that on the 8th of April 625 ACB, the Bunberryburryborn tart was invented. **]**

He slowly reached out and curled his hand around the tart, locking eyes with Hatt as he slid it to his own end of the table. 

"...Do you mind?"

Hatt vigorously shook his head, as if it were his honour and his duty to do so. "It's for you."

> **[** It is, without a doubt, the height of human ingenuity. **]**

Swallowing the last of his cranberry-sprinkled salmon, he curiously eyed the tart, turning the plate on its ring as he wondered where he should start.

_I suppose, with the biscuit,_ he thought, leaving a green hole in the bed of dough as he pulled it out.

"Ah-!" Hatt sat up in his chair, unable to stop himself from speaking up now. "Did you know, you're supposed to crumble that on top of it? To make it salty."

Swift looked up at Hatt, then back down at the biscuit in his hand. He carefully crumbled it over the tart, surprised by how soft it was. Wiping the crumbs off his hands, he sank his spoon into it and took a bite, mindlessly counting the colours inside the tart as he chewed.

_This is... perfection,_ he thought. It was a flawless balance of sweet and salty and sour and cool - a god among tarts, among pastries, among food. Every flavour and texture blended together perfectly. In that moment, he firmly decided to himself that something as genius as the Bunberryburryborn tart was too valuable to leave behind.

_I shall have to procure the recipe for my mother,_ he thought. _She will be positively delighted. I suppose I can also give a copy to my sister, but-_ he stared into the distance. _No, no, nonono, that will never do. I was angry with her for something, something... I can't remember what, but it was something important, I'm sure. Something of paramount significance. Something of the utmost substance._ He took another bite of the tart, sitting back in his chair. _I suppose if she'll grovel at my feet, I can allow her to glimpse at its greatness, if only for a second..._ Satisfied with himself, he shovelled the rest of the tart in his mouth, so quickly there wasn't a crumb left on the plate when Hatt looked up from his food. As the waitress passed by their table, Swift leaned over the side of his chair and motioned to her.

"Yes sir?"

"Can I have another tart, to go?"

"To go?" she asked.

"I mean, like, to take home with me."

Hatt opened his wallet, nervously peering inside.

She gave a bow. "My apologies, sir. That was our last one for today."

Hatt sighed in relief, dropping the wallet in his lap as Swift sank back into his chair, sulking to himself. 

"Oh, no... It's fine."

✻✻✻

Stuffed with rice and berries and custard, he followed Hatt over the long, arched bridge that connected the town. Across the water he saw a quaint, brick house, like something out of a storybook. It sat in the middle of a grass field, and it was the only building Swift had seen that wasn't sandwiched between several others. Red rose bushes had been planted along its four walls, and a lattice overrun with grape vines decorated the side that saw the noon sun. A short distance from the house was an old oak tree that covered a stretch of the field like a cloud, and in its shade was a long table set for tea. It looked like it could seat about thirty people, but many people were instead lying in the grass under the tree, leaving most of the seats vacant.

_So it is a tea party,_ Swift thought.

As they crossed the field, some of the people lying in the grass gave polite nods to Hatt, who bowed back. Meanwhile, Swift followed on his heels, pretending to himself that if he stuck close enough to Hatt, no one would see him at all. He followed Hatt's example when they reached the table, and took a seat in the chair next to his. Their cushions were decorated in the same ornate, blue pattern as the tablecloth, and as he sat down, he took notice of the book that was set by his place at the table. Its cover was made of a soft, brown imitation leather, and had no title but was embossed with the image of a rabbit in a tailcoat. There was an identical book placed before every seat at the table, as well as a cup on a saucer, and a spread knife. At the centre of the table was circle of tea pots, and in the middle, a plate of toasted bread biscuits and a large dish of butter. Others who were seated at the table had already started eating their buttered toast, and were reaching across the table to pour themselves some tea. Swift thought to himself that he had no room left in his stomach for air to breathe, much less for bread and butter. But if ceremony called for it, he had no choice but to oblige and eat everything they had to offer.

His attention turned from the tea party guests to the house when the door creaked open, and a little girl in a powder-blue dress and white stockings stepped out. The guests at the table and in the field bowed to her as she trotted over the grass, to which she curtsied in reply before taking her seat at the end of the table, nearest the trunk of the tree. She looked about ten years old, give or a take a year, Swift thought, watching her straighten the folds in her dress. Then, she opened the book. Save for the crunching of those eating their buttered toast, the table and field fell silent when she began to read in her childish drawl. As he watched the spectacle unfold, Swift had the feeling that it was no ordinary tea party after all.

"She had read several nice, little histories about children who had gotten burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them," she read. He was met with an odd sense of nostalgia at these words. "Such as," she went on, "that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds." 

_I know this story_ , Swift thought, sitting upright in his chair as he opened the book. 

"And she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison'," at this, the whole table chorused the word _poison_ with her, startling Swift so much that he nearly dropped the book, "it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

> **[** 627 → A book is unearthed in the ashes of a first-wave city. It is, to date, the only book that has been found perfectly intact in the aftermath of the disaster. The superstitious among them take this to be a sign, and the idea that it may be a holy book begins to circulate. This idea soon takes its roots in society, laying the foundations of the first major second-wave religion. **]**

He frantically flipped to the beginning of the book. Printed ink black ink across the first page, he saw the words:

_Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_

_By Lewis Carroll_

> **[** 630-740 → The influence of Carroll's book gives birth to an organised belief system known as Carrollism. In 632, the first reprints of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ are distributed. Its reach extends along the coast of the Scandinavian settlements, and eventually by sea trade, the Chinese settlements. It becomes fashionable to speak in mock-English accents, and grow gardens inside and outside the home, and bake everything imaginable into a pie. People begin to discover the influence of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ in various mediocre summaries of first-wave entertainment. They find the Japanese were particularly fond of the book, and used it frequently as an inspiration for various works of fiction, music, and games. It is thought that the Japanese "must have known something" and as a result, many of their customs are adopted and preserved. Chopsticks are used in a seemingly white society, rice is eaten as a staple with every meal, buildings are constructed in likeness of their architecture, seasons are celebrated, and they leave unpleasant sentences half-finished. 
> 
> 743 → Carrollism becomes the official religion of humanity's second wave. Their congress votes to rename their Scandinavian settlements _The Wonderlands_ , and to rename their Asian settlements _The Underlands_.
> 
> May 919 (2751 A.D.) → I crash into a forest known as the Caterpillar Wood, and remain unconscious for days after being separated from the time ship. **]**


	2. If you don't much care where you're going, then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Swift sank into the bench and tipped his head back. Hatt sat down in the space beside him, trying to read his expression as he mindlessly stared into the sun. A few minutes had passed in silence when Hatt ventured to ask him, "Do you remember where your home is?"

Swift was unresponsive for some time, and eventually Hatt began to wonder if he had even heard him. He was about to give him a tap on the shoulder when Swift suddenly showed signs of life again. Sighing, he sat forward and hunched over, folding his hands as he looked gravely his shoes.

"No. I'll have to look for one."

"Do you have money?"

"...No. I'll have to look for some."

✻✻✻

The leasing office was on the third floor of a narrow, little building. Beneath it was a dentist's office, and beneath the dentist's office was a law firm. Their shoes clomped up the iron stairs leading up the wall, and they opened the door to what was essentially a small room with a desk, a chair, a typewriter. The agent stood up from her chair and gave a shallow bow in greeting, and Swift carefully copied her gesture. 

"Over here," Hatt said.

The wall at the back of the room was covered from end to end in flyers that advertised homes and rooms for lease. Some of the flyers were handwritten, and some included sketches of floor plans, while others included doodles of nothing in particular, like a grinning cat, or an overflowing teacup. Some flyers were plainly typed. As he skimmed the wall, he realised that it was not as chaotic as it had seemed at first glance. They were organised in order of highest price to lowest price, with the highest priced being furthest left, and the lowest priced being furthest right. Though he had no sense for the value of their money, he reasoned that if a two-bedroom home was being listed for 900 _flats_ per month, and a single room in a shared apartment was 180 _flats_ per month, the disparity between them wasn't much different from what he was used to at home.

> **[** Their money is printed, much like ours, in the form of colourful rectangular bills. However, the dominant pigment in them is red, and the lowest value that can be printed on a bill is not 1, but 1/24th. They refer to these as _flats_. When I asked Hatt why, he replied, "Well, because they're flat, of course." **]**

He moved to the right side of the wall, skimming over the descriptions to find the listing prices. "I shouldn't bother with anything over 200 a month..." he decided. 

_Apartment 19, 417 East Gryphon St, Block 4..._

As he reached to unpin the listing from the wall, the agent behind the desk said, "I apologise, sir, those are not for the taking."

He glanced over his shoulder, then back at the wall. It was so awfully inconvenient when he didn't have anything to snap pictures of the flyers with. _Maybe I can ask her to copy them down,_ he thought, eyeing the typewriter on her desk.

"Got them."

Swift looked up at Hatt. "Got what?"

"The ones under 200."

"Where?"

"I've got them remembered, I mean," Hatt said, very naturally. 

Swift gaped at him, thinking to himself that either Hatt had a very impressive memory for an idiot, or he was completely full of it. "...Then, let's start with the one listed at 72 a month."

As they stepped into the street, Hatt paused, looking left, looking right - then looking up, for no apparent reason. "I think East Gryphon street is this way," he said, pointing to the left.

They started to the left, and continued until they saw the sign that read _East Gryphon St,_ and turned the corner. As he trailed after him, Swift asked him, "Hatt, how is it that your memory's so good?"

Hatt glanced back at him, looking surprised more than anything else. He gave a puzzled sort of laugh as he looked down at his shoes. "My memory's no good at all."

"But you memorised the addresses on four flyers like it was nothing," Swift pressed, leaning forward to read his expressions better.

Hatt smiled shyly to himself, like he thought he was being flattered. "I think we'd all be quite helpless if we couldn't memorise a few letters and num-oh!" before he could finish his thought, he cupped a hand over his mouth, turning to Swift. "But I don't mean you, of course! It must hard, having amnesia and all..."

Swift blanked again, looking down in thought as he walked.

**✻✻✻**

They turned another corner, into a smaller, dead-end street that ran parallel to the street they were on before, and they continued for some time until they reached the building labelled _417_. 

It was a rundown structure, riddled with cracks and barred windows. The area in front of the building was a long stretch of unkempt grass, and it was tucked in the narrow space behind two other buildings, where it hardly saw any light. 

"What was the apartment number?" Swift asked.

"Nineteen."

Swift started up the flight of stairs going up the side of the building, to the second-floor platform that ran across the front. His shoes loudly clambered over the thin iron floor as he looked for the door labelled _19_. When he reached it at last, he first looked for a bell. Then, realising there wasn't one, he gave a knock. A growl from the mail slot made him step back, as the sound of feeble footsteps tapped across the floor. The door creaked open, and he saw an old, frail woman step onto the threshold, with a very fat, white cat curled on top of her head, and another weaving between her legs like it was threading invisible strings. Swift offhandedly wondered how her frail spine could support the weight of such a frighteningly large cat.

"A good day to you," she said kindly, giving a shallow bow. "What brings you here?"

Swift noticed that when she bowed, she made something of peace sign with her right hand and held it to her chest. When the agent at the leasing office had done the same, he'd thought she was strange. But he realised now that it was probably customary.

"I'm-" _This is ridiculous,_ he thought, watching the cat on her head yawn and wave its tail in front of her face. "-here to see the available room."

She clapped her hands together, so softly that it was closer to silence than sound. "Oh! Lovely!" she smiled. "Please come in." 

She moved out of the doorway to make room for him as he stepped inside. 

"...Your shoes, dear."

He looked down at his feet. 

"Oh... sorry." 

Leaving his shoes by the door, he followed her into the apartment. 

The hallway was narrow, too narrow even for two people to stand side by side, and to add the pressing issue of space, two more cats had appeared seemingly out of nowhere and were eying his feet like they were prey. "Please come this way," she said, leading him through the flowery kitchen area to a door on the other side. He'd expected as much, but it was dismally dark inside the home. Even with all the blinds open, hardly any light came in.

"This room belonged to my daughter," she said. When she opened the door, another cat suddenly flew down from the ceiling, landing on Swift's face and sending him tumbling back. Then in the same motion, it leapt away, conveniently using his face as a springboard. "Oh my ears and whiskers!" she smiled, playfully waving her hand at the furry demon. "This one's quite shy around strangers. Do forgive him for getting so excited."

Wiping the fur off his mouth, he sat up to get a look at the matchbox of a room. A bed with rosy sheets was squeezed into one end, and a white vanity stood across from it in the other. The window in the room was broken and barred, and paint was chipping away in large patches on the walls. But what struck him most were the four cats slumbering on the bed, and the two others lazing in an open drawer of the vanity. Lost for words, Swift hauled himself onto his feet.

"Oh, there's Cheshire," she said as one of the cats climbed out of the drawer and brushed past them. "And this one's also Cheshire," she smiled at the second cat who climbed out of the vanity.

"Cheshire and Cheshire?" Swift asked.

The old woman shook her head and corrected him, "No, no. This one is Cheshire. That one is _Also Cheshire_."

Dumbfounded, Swift pressed his lips together. It was his first time meeting a creature with an adverb in its name. Ignoring the absurdity of it, he cautiously stepped into the room, keeping an eye on the ceiling for any falling cats. "Um, if you don't mind my asking, how many cats do you own?"

The old woman put a hand to her cheek in thought. "Oh, my. Sixteen, I believe."

Swift fought to keep his jaw from dropping - from falling off his face all together.

"If all is well," she went on. "The deposit on the room will be seventy-two flats."

"Deposit?" he echoed. "Do I need to pay it before moving in?"

She nodded. "Yes. Very much so."

Swift's eyes looked less like eyes and more like voids as he stared off into the distance.

✻✻✻

When he came down the stairs, Hatt was sitting on the bottom step.

"How was it?" he asked.

"Hairy."

He nodded sympathetically as Swift dusted the stray cat hairs off his jumper.

"Could you point me to the next place in your memory bank?"

"Ah-" Hatt scuttled into the street, and spun around a few times like a compass needle trying to find North. "This way," he said, decidedly.

✻✻✻

They turned into a quiet street that felt worlds away from the lively atmosphere of the business districts. There were no shops or offices or restaurants, only rows of tall residential buildings along narrow streets, only strips of grass and shady trees and potted gardens in every balcony. One building had a tailcoat-wearing rabbit engraved in its side (just like the one in their tea party book), and the building across from it was engraved with a large turtle that stood upright on a rock. They continued down the street until they reached the building labelled _935_. 

At the very least, Swift thought, it was nicer than the last place. The door led them into a sunlit entrance hall, where a grid of mail lockers formed the back wall, and at the centre of the hall was a long, spiralling staircase.

"What was the unit number?"

"Seventy-one."

Swift peered into all the corners of the hall for an elevator, before he sighed and reluctantly started up the stairs.

He made it to the fourth floor on two legs, but, by the time they were climbing the seventh flight of stairs, he was trailing behind Hatt on his hands and knees. Dragging himself up the last few steps, he collapsed at the top of the stairs, pausing to catch his breath. In his agony, he looked up at Hatt's perfectly still frame.

"Hatt," he huffed. "How is it that you're so good at climbing stairs?"

Hatt smiled again, as if he were being flattered, then said with an air of pity, "It must be very hard for you, being malnourished and all..."

Swift cursed to himself.

When at last there was enough air in his lungs to breathe, he gripped the railing and pulled himself onto his feet. At the end of the hall was a door with the gilded numbers _71_. He searched again for a bell. Then, seeing none, he gave a knock and took a step back.

It was very quiet on the other side. Beginning to wonder if anyone was home, he looked back at Hatt, who shrugged in reply. He was ready to give up and roll himself back down the stairs when the sound of footsteps came behind the door. The handle turned, and the door opened just a crack.

"Can I help you?" came a mutter.

"Um... I'm here to see the available room."

The door swung open.

"Ah, the room, yes."

> **[** In the doorway stood the most immaculate nerd I've ever seen. He was truly the epitome, the spitting image of the brainy character - the one who wears heavy-framed glasses, and knows every word in the dictionary, and recites pi instead of counting sheep, and owns exactly three shirts, and who, when someone shows them kindness without reason, whips out their calculator and starts punching in numbers, mumbling to themselves, "This doesn't make any sense." **]**

The world's most immaculate nerd nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "I trust you saw my advert in the leasing office."

Biting back his laughter, Swift gave a nod. "Yes."

He watched with fascination as the nerd king adjusted his glasses again, this time by pinching the side of the frame and wigging it a few times. Then he looked Swift up and down with the slightest trace of a grimace on his face.

"May I see it?" Swift asked again.

"...Ah, the room, yes."

A silence fell over them as their eyes locked. Trying to break the tension, Swift gave another slow, awkward nod. "...Yes."

"First," he began, "I'll have you know that I need absolute silence. I _cannot_ tolerate noise in the unit. _Not_ in the least."

Swift blinked at him, lost for what to say. "...Duly noted. And, if I may, now... the room-"

"Ah, the room, yes."

Swift nodded slowly. "...Yes."

"It's also of vital importance," he went on, "that you understand how much it would inconvenience me if you were to bring over guests unannounced, or announced. It makes no difference, really. Guests give me existential despair. Also, cinnamon gives me nasal despair, so I ask that you refrain from bringing cinnamon into the home. Or guests."

Swift's head seemed to go numb as he listened to him talk. "Noted... Now, the room... if I may?"

"Ah, the room, yes."

"...Yes."

Nerdpoleon looked him up and down again, crossing his arms over his chest. "By the by, the deposit on the room will be one-twenty flat."

Swift blinked back at him. "Will I need to pay it before moving in?"

"Given that it's a deposit, I don't see how else it could be arranged."

Swift glanced over his shoulder at Hatt. He took a long, shallow breath, then faced forward again. Keeping his head low, he backed away from the door. "...Have a good day."

✻✻✻

"Will you see more today?" Hatt asked as they came down the stairs.

"I don't have a choice," he said, muttering to himself all the way down, "I _cannot_ tolerate noise in the unit. _Not_ in the least. I _cannot_ stand it in a house, I _cannot_ stand it with a mouse, I _cannot_ stand it in a box, I _cannot_ stand it with a fox..."

✻✻✻

"Is this... number thirty-one?"

Hatt raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and looked around. "It's thirty-one alright," he said, pointing to the number engraved in the wall.

They stood before a perfectly hideous building, in a perfectly hideous lot. The walls were splattered with stains and riddled with holes and cracked stones. There were more dirt craters in the yard than there was grass, and no flowers to speak of but plenty of dead trees, sleeping tenants, and bags of trash where crows perched like kings. On the iron platforms that separated each story of the building, there were people leaning against the rails, and others sitting with their legs hanging through the bars. They all looked half-asleep as they blew clouds of smoke into the air. 

As he started up the stairs to the second floor, he stepped over another person who was asleep in a haze of smoke. Keeping close to the wall, he made his way to the door labelled _28_ , and didn't bother to look for a bell this time. The metal door clanged as he gave a knock, and glanced over his shoulder to see if he'd drawn any unwanted attention. To his relief, everyone there seemed to be quite oblivious to their surroundings. 

When the door opened, a very tidy-looking young woman smiled up at him, and gave a bow.

"Can I help you with something?"

He moved past his surprise at her kempt appearance and said, "I'm here to see the available room."

"Oh!" she waved him inside. "Come on in."

Appearances were deceiving, he thought, as he stepped over the threshold into another cloud of smoke. He covered his mouth with his sleeve and hunched over to cough, startling himself upright again when he saw a lifeless cockroach brushed to the side of the hall.

"Right through this way, dearest" she smiled, waving him down the hall.

More inclined to run out the door than to follow her, Swift took very hesitant steps down the hall.

"Oh no, your shoes."

He looked down at his feet.

"Oh... sorry."

He left them by the door with a silent prayer, hoping to himself that nothing would crawl inside them until he returned. The young woman led him past the kitchen, where a leaning pile of dishes was somehow standing very firmly in the sink, and where the floor was so littered with crumpled clothes and empty snack boxes and wooden chopsticks and cups that he could not see the colour of the tiles underneath. When they turned the corner at the end of the hall, he jumped again at the sight of a dark creature on the floor, only this time, it appeared to be alive and sleeping.

He was covered in little bandages, with lines as dark as ink under his eyes, and a nest of tangled hair on his head. He appeared to be wearing a sock on one hand and a glove on one foot, and was hugging a broom like it was a pillow. Never had Swift seen the concept of 'disaster' so artfully embodied in human form. As they stepped over him to the bedroom door, he suddenly reached out to grab Swift by the end of his jumper. Eyes wide with dread, Swift looked over his shoulder, watching him lift his head off the floor to mumble what sounded vaguely like, "Don't forget my butter biscuits..."

Hesitantly, Swift gave a nod, relieved to see him put his head down and drift back to sleep. The young woman didn't bat an eye at the scene, and as she opened the door to the bedroom, Swift startled again at the feeling of something on his heels. Only, this time it was Hatt.

"Shameless!" he muttered under his breath, too giddy to keep still as he clung to Swift's back.

"Oh! Can I help you?" she asked him.

Hatt fervently shook his head, as if it were his honour and his duty to do so. "I'm his memory," he said, pointing to Swift.

"His memory? Oh my... I've never met a person's memory before. But I suppose he would be quite troubled without it."

"Quite right," Hatt nodded.

Swift could feel his head going numb again as nonsense filled the air.

With a pleasant smile still clinging to her face, she led them into a room very want of light. But when he stepped inside, what drew his attention was not the glass-less window, but the large splatter on the wall. It was a dark, inky shade of red, that stood out in stark contrast to the white paintwork, and had run in drops to the floor. Hatt, on the other hand, was preoccupied with a swampy stain on the ceiling, that seemed to travel down a line where a pipe might have been. Unsettled enough as it was, Swift turned his attention to a corner of the room that was shrouded in darkness, wondering to himself why the light wouldn't reach it.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked. "Any questions at all?"

"Yeah..." Swift mumbled, at a loss for how to word it delicately. "...Did someone die in this room?"

For a moment, her expression was unreadable.

"I'm sorry?" she said in a half-laugh, reassembling her face into a smile again. "Oh, you mean the blood orange stains?"

"Blood... orange?" he echoed. Suddenly, he stilled when in the corner of his eye he caught something moving in the darkest corner of the room. As he gazed into the void, he gradually saw two circles emerge from the nothingness, and found himself staring into the eyes of an owl. It gave a hoot - one hoot - that seemed to reach into his very soul.

"Um..." no matter how he turned his head to face the young woman, he couldn't tear his eyes away from its stare. "Seeing as... the blood orange stains are so-"

_"Hoot"_

"-ex..tensive... Could I perhaps pay the deposit at the end of my first month...?"

At this, her expression became unreadable again. She cupped a hand by her ear and leaned in. "I'm sorry, dear. My ears seem to be a bit stuffy today. What was that?"

✻✻✻

On tired feet, he trudged into the glint of the setting sun. He'd long since burned off his lunch by winding through the maze of streets that formed the city, and he was running on exhaust fumes now. If anything kept his feet moving, it was the promise of finding a place to lie down and sleep.

"This is the one," said Hatt.

They turned into a street where the farther they walked, the more space stretched between the buildings. It was the first street he'd been to where every structure wasn't glued to the ones beside it and behind it. The spaces between the buildings were decorated with ponds and gardens, statues and fountains, with rose bushes and tiny orchards. Birdsongs lilted in the air, and the colours faded from old and stony greys to dream-like pastels.

"Three-oh-two!" Hatt announced, pointing to the building that housed the last and most expensive unit on their list.

It was a tall, imposing thing, but it was painted in the softest power-blue. It had the kind of aesthetic that fit in seamlessly with its surroundings, but would have stuck out like a thorn on any ordinary street in town. A short flight of stairs led up to the stained glass doors at the entrance of the building, where a doorman stood in a white uniform, with a pressed carnation in the pocket of his coat. He gave a bow as they came up the steps, and opened the door to a foyer of glittering marble floors, and high ceilings painted with blue skies and golden clouds. Both Hatt and Swift spun around with their eyes to the ceiling for some time, awing at the grandiosity of it all.

"I'm going up to see the unit," Swift said.

"Okay..." Hatt mumbled, too captivated by the paintings to look away.

Leaving Hatt to admire the ceiling, he started up the stairs. Gravity felt heavier with every flight, and by the time he reached the eighth floor, he'd made his peace with the possibility that he might topple over and die before he ever saw the unit.

When he'd caught his breath, he stumbled over the to the door labelled _83,_ and raised his hand to knock. It was then he noticed a peculiar line hanging from the side of the door, strung from top to bottom with beads in the shapes of flowers and suns.

_A doorbell...?_

He was stupidly excited when he gave it a tug and heard a bell chime on the other side. A woman's voice reached him from somewhere inside the apartment. "...Coming!"

The door opened, and before him stood a person he could only think to describe as _wealthy_. She was wealthy in the pearls that decorated neck and ears, wealthy in the vibrantly coloured floor-length dress that trailed behind her, wealthy in the feathered sunhat she wore on her head, wealthy in all the food she must have eaten to grow so heavy. "And you are?" she asked.

"...Swift," he said, giving a nod. "I'm here to see the available room."

"Oh, of course, of course!" she smiled, giving a shallow bow and stepping aside. "Do you make yourself at home, Swift sir."

His eyes twinkled as he stepped into the sunlight flooding the entrance. Butterflies fluttered around an open window decorated with budding tomato plants. The floors were made of marble, and all manners of glass and porcelain ornaments sparkled in the light. 

"It's this way," she said.

He pulled his attention away from the glitz and the glamour of the entrance hall. Leaving his shoes by the door, he followed her through the kitchen, past the sitting room, and into a hallway lined with several doors. He peered inside each room as they passed, wide-eyed in wonder at how spacious they were - behind him, a music room, to his left, a library, to his right, a guest bedroom, and ahead of him, a dining room with a long table and twelve chairs.

"Mind the turtle."

Swift stumbled back, realising he'd nearly stepped on a giant turtle crossing the hallway. Moving around it in awe, he followed her to the end of the hallway, where the door opened to a small baroque study with a desk and a daybed and a mahogany bookcase.

"Oh, dear, I'm sorry it's such a tight space," she sighed, opening the closet door.

It was certainly small, Swift thought as he came around to look inside. It had enough room for a few coats at most, but considering that he had only the clothes on his back, it wasn't of much importance to him. "That's alright," he said. "I'm not too worried about the closet space."

A silence fell over them, before she barked with laughter, brushing her fingertips over her ear. "This isn't your closet, dear. It's your room."

His eyes turned to voids again. He looked at her, then again at the closet. At a glance, he tried to measure the width, tipping his head to the side as he imagined stretching himself out to sleep. _No, impossible,_ he concluded. He'd have to sleep with his knees to his chest, or his feet sticking out. In the midst of his shock and confusion, the turtle crawled between them, and began butting its head against the back wall of the tiny closet. Sighing, he swallowed his pride - along with any other semblance of self-respect. "Then, the deposit-"

"Yes, if you decide to move in, I'll need the deposit by the end of next week. Also, utilities are not included."

✻✻✻

He fell to his hands and knees, pressing his fists into the pavement.

"Why?!"

Onlookers slowed down to stare at him as they passed.

> **[** It's insanity! No one will lend you so much as an ear if you can't pay a deposit on it! What is a person to do if they find themselves short on money? It's as if they're saying: _Your life is only worth as much as the flats in your pocket! And if your pockets are empty, you are cordially invited to_ ** _die_** _!_ Who could ever, in good faith, contribute to such a godless, greedy, unfeeling excuse for civilised human society? **]**

He lifted his head off the ground, watching as people who had stopped to stare quickly hurried on their way. At a loss for what to do, he looked around the street, and crawled under a table in the outdoor seating area of the nearest cafe, leaving only his feet sticking out from under the cloth. "Here is fine," he said, very resolutely.

Hatt came around to the seating area. "...It's a table."

"Yes, and quite a fine one," Swift added. "I know a thing or two about table real estate, mind you."

"Oh...?" Hatt did his best to sound convinced, for fear of offending. "I didn't know tables were a kind of real estate."

He choked up, trying to keep his voice from trembling as he spoke. "What matters most is the material, you see." His hand came out from under the cloth and traced the spirals in the legs. "The shape, and what kind of weather it can protect you from, of course. The curve of the legs, or lack of curve for that matter, it's..." Despite his efforts, his voicecracked, and he began to cry. "...It's really a science, when you get down to it."

Flustered Hatt looked left and right, up then down, and back at the table as he wondered what to do. "Then...! You might as well live under my table!" he stammered. "It's a real good one! It's made of wood, and it has a shelf, and sometimes... it has a cloth..."

Swift sat up, and poked his head out from under the table. "What times?"

Hatt gave this some thought. "Uh, well... Mostly in the winter, I suppose."

Wiping his face on his sleeve, he rose to his feet, and crossed his arms with a sort of arrogance that didn't suit the ugly pout on his face at all. "It might be worth a look, then," he sniffled. "Not because _I_ want to rent it, of course. Only to aid you in assessing the value of it, so you may put it up for lease when you so choose."

Dumbstruck, Hatt gaped at him for a few seconds, before he hunched over and snorted with laughter.

✻✻✻

It was a narrow building with a reddish roof, tucked into a lot behind the main street, on the fringe of town where the forest trail met the cobblestone. There were stairs leading all up the sides of the building, but Hatt used his key to unlock a door on the ground floor. He stepped inside and brushed the dirt out of the entranceway, and Swift followed him in, leaving his shoes by the door.

The apartment was a tiny loft, built like a puzzle where the architects had tried to stack everything into the smallest, possible arrangement. Against the left wall was a line of short bookshelves, and built into the right wall was a tiny kitchen, with a sink and a stove, where the smell of cooked rice rose up from the open pot. Beside the stove was an icebox, and a counter sandwiched by cabinets above and below, with two barstools at the end. The back wall had a door that led into a washroom, and reaching over the door was the staircase to the loft. It had room only for the bed with a storage underneath it on one end, and the sofa with the coffee table on the other. Above the bed was a small window, where only a little bit of light filtered in through the pine trees, leaving it rather dark inside. But it was lit by the white string of lights that wound across the railing, and the glowing lanterns that were placed atop the bookshelves.

It was a matchbox of a home, he thought, smaller than he could ever imagine one being built. But what struck him most was the plant population in Hatt's apartment. There were potted plants in every corner and on every shelf, and hanging on hooks from the loft railing. Some of them flowered, some of them seemed to grow fruit, and some of them looked like tiny trees.

Hatt started up the stairs to the loft. "It's up here."

He followed him to the side of the loft where the coffee table sat before the sofa. They stood above the table in silence, staring at it for a good minute. Swift thought to himself that it was, indeed, wooden. And it did not, in fact, have a table cloth. But it was, admittedly, the month of May.

"It's a very nice," he paused to wipe his nose again with his sleeve, "...table."

Hatt glanced at Swift, then back down at the table. "If you rent it now, I'll throw in the sofa for free."

Swift looked up, staring him dead in the eye. "And the deposit?"

Hatt shook his head vigorously, like it were his honour and his duty to do so.

"How much is the rent?"

The question made him cup a hand over his chin in thought. His face suddenly lit up when he turned to Swift and said, "Problematic!"

Tears beaded in Swift's eyes again as his hand came down on Hatt's shoulder.

"Christ..."

"It's Hatt-"

"You're using it all wrong," he muttered, pressing his sleeve to his eyes.

> **[** I have undertaken the inconvenience of categorising the many complex classes of stupid, and after sparing no efforts in my endeavour to create a fair and organised system, I have simplified it as follows: There is mean stupid, dangerous stupid, secret stupid, irredeemable stupid, so smart you're stupid, and good stupid. Hatt is, without a doubt, the most good, the best stupid. I am certain that if ever there was extensive researchdone in the field of stupid, they would confirm this to be true. **]**


	3. No book is a book without a picture or a conversation.

His eyes opened to a white light. It stretched on for as far as he could see, with no ends and no turns, no colours and no shapes. It was nothing, the most nothing he'd ever seen or could ever imagine.

... _This is it,_ he thought. _I'm dead._

It only seemed appropriate now for his life to flash before his eyes, so he took a moment to try and remember everything that had ever happened to him. But try as he did, he could only remember a few things, like his classroom in first grade, and the seafood pasta dish that his mother cooked very well, and that a store named Blockbuzzer had existed once, even though its existence felt like a fever dream now.

_This is all wrong! None of these things matter..._

Disappointed by how insignificant the flashes of his life were, he gave up on trying to remember any more. He stared into the white light, and as the bleariness faded from his eyes, it slowly took the shape of something else. It had a texture, like fur, and on closer inspection, it was breathing. He jolted back, and it leapt into the air. As he sat up, he found himself locked in a stare with a dwarfish white rabbit. It was curled up on Hatt's bed, frantic from the fright they'd given each other. Using Hatt's pillows as a step, it scurried through the open window. Swift clambered onto the bed and looked out at the thicket of trees. The rabbit's tail wiggled behind it as it squeezed under a blackberry bush, and disappeared from sight. Sighing, he sank back down on the bed. 

In the silence, it occurred to him that Hatt wasn't home.

He shuffled across the loft and gathered his blanket off the floor, bundling it up by his pillow. It was then he spotted the scrap of paper on the coffee table. Lifting it to his face, he squinted at the message written on it.

_Gon to werk._

It was not clear if the modern spelling of these words had changed, or if Hatt was just an astoundingly bad speller, but as he turned the paper over, he remembered that what he needed to do immediately was make a written record of everything that had happened to him until now. 

He came down the stairs and began to search the bookcases. In the one nearest the door, he found a stack of loose papers pressed between books, and on the bottom shelf, a box of pens and tubes of ink. Setting a few leafs of paper on the floor, he knelt down and started writing (as faithfully as possible) everything that he could recall happening since he woke up in the Caterpillar Wood. When several pages had been filled with his account, his gaze jerked to the bookcase. Dropping the pen, he stood up and began to scan the spines of Hatt's books - books of all sizes and colours, stacked vertically and diagonally and horizontally into the shelves, however they would fit. One bookcase had no books, and was instead filled with quaint, dusty, old trinkets - a compass, a brass globe, a ship in a bottle. There were all sorts of mundane and traditional forms of entertainment on its shelves, like wooden board games, decks of playing cards, canvases and water paints, and what looked like a miniature gramophone beside a stack of records. 

It became apparent that Hatt, who was very fond of greenery, had collected even more books on the subject than he had plants. When he pulled a vegetable growing book from the shelf and skimmed a few pages, it also became apparent that Hatt was in fact an astoundingly bad speller. There were books on every category of plants, the histories of plants, the proper care of plants, even plant-based philosophy - which Swift was curious enough to flip through but couldn't make the least sense of. There were mystery books, horror books, fairytale books, and an entire bookcase dedicated solely to comic books. Curiously, he pulled out a book titled, _A Collection of Old Fairytales_ , where he found tales from the Vedas, the Quran, Greek mythology, and to his dismay, the Christian bible. Sighing in frustration, he slid it back onto the shelf and continued his search. 

In the corner of a shelf which seemed to house books that hadn't been moved in ten years, he saw a spine with the title, _The History of Humanity_. A cloud of dust floated up from the cover as he pulled it out and began flipping through the pages, realising it was exactly the sort of book he was looking for. It gave summaries of events from recent decades all the way back to the beginning of written history in the Mesopotamian era. But when he read a few pages in full, it became apparent that something about the book was very off. He noticed this when he flipped to the chapter that described the events of World War II, where the author stated that it began when Britain declared war on Germany in the year _107_. Swift was not well versed in world history, but he was sure that World War II did not begin shortly after the death of Jesus Christ. Turning to the start of the book, he skimmed the introduction.

"Events that take place before 0 ACB," he read, "will be written in the form of BCB - Before Carroll's Birth, where the years should be read as negative numbers."

_If BCB stands for Before Carroll's Birth,_ he thought, _ACB must mean After Carroll's birth._

Swift knew that Lewis Carroll was born at some point in the 1800s, but that was all he knew. Sinking to the floor, he set the book down on his lap and hunched over in thought. If he could only remember the exact dates of two historically significant events, he could find them in the book and calculate the differences between the Carrollist and Gregorian counting systems. But however hard he thought about it, he could only seem to remember the exact dates of historically insignificant events, like the years when recent presidents were elected, or the year he graduated from college, or the year Starbocks Coffee was founded, or the year Jumpskin Beaver released his debut album. And it frustrated him all the more when he remembered how easily Hatt could memorise entire sequences of letters and numbers, and how humbly he insisted that his memory wasn't any good at all. He gripped his head, sinking closer to the floor as he tried to remember a date significant enough that it would be written in the book. Suddenly he sprang up when he remembered the year of the moon landing - 1969. He turned pages until he found it at last, written under the year _137_. Making a note of the numbers, he stared down at the pages of the book as he tried to remember another date.

_2079... The devastating vegan smoothie shortage in Southern California... 2065... Hurricane Balthazar-McZader... 2052... The Supreme Court battle over whether "women" are living humans or if "undead baby receptacle" was a more appropriate word for future dictionaries... 2034... Chaos in the capitol after Americans everywhere jokingly register their pets as congressional candidates and a third of congress is accidentally replaced by dogs, even though it makes no noticeable difference in their ability, or rather their inability, to legislate... Oh, 1776... The founding of the United States-_

He turned back stacks of pages, and flipped through the chapter titled: _The Birth of a Superpower_. Here, the date of the United State's founding was written under the year 56 BCB. He glanced at the numbers he'd written down earlier.

_The difference between 1969 and 1776 is equal to the difference between 137 and -56. Years are still 365 days long. If 137 ACB is the same as 1969 AD, then 0 ACB should be 1832 AD. Lewis Carroll was born in 1832. In which case... 919 ACB would be equal to... 2751 AD?_

His eyes were full-moon wide when he realised that he had travelled almost 700 years into the future. It left him with an odd, disoriented feeling, as if the floor had suddenly tilted beneath his feet. He offhandedly thought to himself there must have been a bug in the ship's system, because he'd been travelling carefully decade by decade. Moreover, he wasn't even sure the system allowed the ship to travel more than 100 years at a time. To suddenly jump 500 years into the future was an anomaly. Shaking his head, he turned back to the book. At least now that he understood the Carrollist counting system, he could bring home an intelligible account of their history, and consequently, his own future. 

As he flipped through the chapters, he found the invention of the iDecidusTempus written under the year 249. He pulled a blank sheet of paper from under his pile, and began to write, mumbling to himself, "For the purpose of giving context to this journal..."

Slowly and meticulously, he reconstructed a timeline of events beginning from the invention of the time ship to his present in the Wonderlands. And he paused his frantic scribbling only once, when he landed on the page with the answer they'd been searching for.

"285..." he read. "The year of the great disaster...?"

It was here, in front of him now, physically in his hands now, no longer a mystery but a number printed plainly on paper. Several chapters of the book detailed the events following a mysterious disaster that nearly brought humanity to its extinction, and spared only those who were miles under the sea at the time. It stated that no search had ever been carried out to find remaining human civilisations, because the task was too great and the chancesof success were too low. Humans were a fragile species, and anyone who survived on land was likely to die of injury, starvation, or lack of drinkable water. Countless other species on earth were buried with humanity, and the only commonly domesticated animals that survived were those brought onto the Applelon Plumusk Submarine Hotel as pets.

The book told of the hardships the remaining 0.0000002% of humanity had suffered when they returned to the surface and found thousands of years of human history and ingenuity turned to rubble. Some had proposed theories of meteor showers and volcanic eruptions, but the nature of the wreckage and the extent of the devastation gave most credence to the theory that nuclear bombs had been dropped across the earth at the height of a rising tension between global superpowers. Swift found that his hands trembled when he reached for the pen, and that his thoughts jumped from place to place as he tried to convert the year of the disaster.

_2... 21... 2117 AD._

For a minute, he did nothing, and thought nothing, only stared at the number inked into his timeline. When cogs began to turn in his head, he thought first of how many years humans had left from the year 2081.

_36._

The disaster that was believed to have occurred in a far-off future would occur in his lifetime. It would burn everything he knew to ash. His dog, his family, his home, his city, his country, everything would be gone in the blink of an eye. The thought made his heart slow to an almost stop. He looked around the room, in need of something, anything that he could hold on to as he waited for the panic to fade, for the floor beneath him to feel steady.

When he felt a semblance of control again, he stood up, leaving his pen and his papers and the history book on the floor. He had the number now, the number that everyone had been so desperate to find. But however much it frightened him, he couldn't lose sight of his mission. Documenting the state of a post-disaster civilisation was a task as important as finding the date of the disaster itself, and he wouldn't have any face left to show if he came back empty-handed.

He began to roam around the matchbox apartment, observing things that no one would think to observe in another's home. He peered at the stove, around it, and behind it, mystified that it was not plugged into anything or rooted the floor, but had two switches on its side that seemed to be connected to the two iron plates on its surface.

> **[** The plates appear to be heated by some kind of exothermic reaction that is triggered by the flick of a switch. It functions very much like an electric stove, but without the use of electricity. Also, the plates won't stay hot for very long and someone must stand above them and continue to flick the switch every few minutes. I assume this is to prevent accidental fires from negligence. The cabinets in the kitchen are stocked with varieties of fruits and vegetables, as well as grains and snacks stored in glass containers. There is an ice box on the floor, but neither is this plugged into something. I imagine its sides are filled with some kind of freezing chemical. When I opened the lower half, it was chock-full of frozen fish. The top half was cold, but not quite as cold, and was filled with drinks and snacks that seem best kept chilled. At one point, I thought I saw a bottle of milk, but it appears to be milk made from grain, or perhaps a vegetable or a nut, I'm not sure, and their butter looks to be made of oil. As far as I can see, there is no dairy, poultry, or meat in the kitchen. Their history book provided some insight on this matter where it details a timeline of their agriculture. The modern Carrollists only farm things that grow from the earth, since a law was passed in 431 ACB that outlawed the farming of animals and animal products, for fear of the effect it would have on the environment. The fish they use in their cooking is entirely caught. I imagine this does not put any strain on their food supply, because their communities are so very small. The city of North Up Wonderland that I am in now has a population of only 62,000, while its neighbours, North Down Wonderland and North Left Wonderland, have a collective population of 232,000. South Wonderland, which populates the southern Scandinavian region, has a population of some 431,000 people across its settlements. And the Underlands, as they call it, last reported a population of some 358,000 people. **]**

The kitchen sink had a mirror above it and a cabinet below it, where he was surprised to find what looked like a dusty hookah. Beside it was a blue, metal tin with a green logo in the shape of a caterpillar, but when he opened the tin it was empty. In the bathroom, there was only a toilet, and nothing else.

> **[** They have embraced the old tradition of communal bath houses, rather than installing baths in each individual home. Also, near the door is a sort of radio built into the wall. This appears to be one of the very limited devices that utilises electricity. It is required by law that one is built into every home, and it has the ability to send and receive alerts in the event of an emergency. It can also be used much like a phone to communicate with people over distances. **]**

In a corner between the bed and the wall, he found a peculiar book that was filled with various illustrations of people sleeping - and nothing else. He paged through it, finding that it actually made him feel very sleepy, and made him yawn every time he saw a picture of someone yawning. Then, under a small blanket bundled up at the foot of the bed, he saw a little wooden box filled with hay.

When he'd documented everything relevant in Hatt's home, he folded his papers and hid them under a seat cushion on the sofa. At this point, his stomach was grumbling terribly, and the pendulum-swinging clock on the wall told him it was past noon. Still, he was hesitant to eat Hatt's food when he was already living on his sofa without any way to pay him back.

He rummaged through the cupboards in the kitchen for something he could make do with, and settled on an apple and a few spoons of cold rice from the pot on the stove. As he sat in the chair, he looked up and down, left and right, at all the plants growing around the apartment. In that moment, he felt that he was not as alone as he thought without Hatt. And that among all the plants, he was the one who was most out of place. He was suddenly hit with a wave of unease at how much he didn't belong, in this apartment, in this city, in this time, and a voice in his head began to nag him. 

_I want to go home... I want to go home... I want to go home._

He pulled his feet up to the edge of the chair and hugged his knees to his chest, staring at the counter as he ate in silence. It was probably best, he thought, to start looking for his time ship.

✻✻✻

"Key... Key..."

He looked in the cupboards and drawers.

"Key... Key... Key..."

He looked in the bookcases.

"Key!"

He found the key hanging behind a jacket on a hook by the door, and slipped into his shoes.

The street was quiet and sleepy, and the sun was so bright that even he felt tempted to shut his eyes. Locking the door behind himself, he started for the trees. A breeze swept the trail as he trekked uphill, pausing at the summit to remember from which direction they'd come. Then, he froze at the echo of Hatt's voice.

"Pat!"

"What?"

"Can you bring four, actually?"

"Ya!"

A rustling came from the grass, and he ducked behind the nearest tree, glancing over his shoulder to see the young face from the day before. He was carrying an empty sack and skipping down the trail like he didn't have a care in the world. Swift waited for him to disappear behind the hill before he scurried into the trees and headed for the clearing.

"Move it out of the way!"

"It's too heavy!"

"Hatt, go help!"

There were others now that he hadn't seen yesterday, bustling around the clearing, chopping trees, moving logs, stacking them in carts, while others pushed around wheelbarrows of soil and planted branches in the ground, drawing borders around them with circles of tiny pebbles. Swift stood motionless as he watched them from behind the trees, wary of being seen or asked why he was there. He began to think that it was reckless to search for the time ship when the forest workers were scurrying around like ants. If he was seen roaming around the forest, they might begin to think he was searching for something valuable, or worse, someone could tail him and discover the time ship themselves. He stared at the ground for some time, while his reasonable self debated his restless self.

With a hard sigh, he headed back to the trail, resolving that it would be best to go looking for it on a day when the forest was empty, like on a weekend, or maybe a holiday. And the question now was what he could do while he waited for the opportunity to present itself. He supposed that for the time being, what he needed the most was money. Money for food, for clothes, and to pay Hatt back for the favour. After all, he couldn't think of any reason Hatt would feel obligated to pay for his meal, or act as his navigator, or put a roof over his head when his only task had been to take him to the hospital. Clearly, Hatt had gone out of his way to help him because he was kind - _too kind,_ he thought. Maybe what Hatt needed was a stern talking-to about the pitfalls of handing out good deeds like free balloons at a carnival.

"Work..." he muttered to himself as he stepped onto the cobblestone at the end of the trail. He wondered if there was an employment office, or a ministry of labour, or a building with a sign along those lines. But even if he were to ask for their help, what would he do if they asked for documents, like an ID, or proof of residence, or proof of citizenship, if they had such things at all? Would he show them an ID card that stated he was 698 years old and born in a country that didn't exist anymore? Would they throw him in jail?

_That might not be too bad, actually,_ he mused. _I bet they give you food in jail..._ He shook his head. _No, no. How would I get out, then? And what if they put me in a cell with a murderer? Or an arsonist? Or a person who likes pineapple on their pizza? I'd go mad._

Kicking up dust, he pushed his hands into his pockets and wandered down the street, looking into shop windows in search of something like a _now hiring_ sign or a _help wanted_ sign. When he neared the bridge, he looked down the strip of cobblestone that ran along the edge of the river, to the harbour where a large ship was docked. Shouts echoed down the street as they carried crates up the ramp and stacked them on the deck. He considered that if any job required little experience or documentation, it was probably physical labour.

As he approached the docks, he heard a voice above the men's shouts - the voice of a woman, that seemed to come down like thunder. At the edge of the ramp stood a man with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck, who was leaning on something that looked an awful lot like a rifle. He was shouting orders to the men hauling the cargo up the ramp, or rather, he was shouting insults at them that sounded vaguely like orders.

"Hurry it up, you dumb Bills! Alice in her little socks could pull her weight better than you lot!"

Swift weaved through the workmen to the man with the rifle. He was cautious in his steps as he approached him, and stopped dead when he caught his eye.

"What's your business?" he scoffed.

Swift hesitated for a moment, before he said, "...Can you give me work?"

He looked Swift up and down, and laughed through his nose. Then he turned to the ship and shouted, "Captainice! This sad string wants work!"

_Sad string...?_

Slow footsteps moved across the deck like a steady drum, and a woman leaned over the side of the ship, looking him in the eyes. 

"Put him to work, then!" she shouted back, and marched away.

"You heard the captain!" he said, turning to Swift. "Get to work!"

He gave a firm nod and for a moment, scrambled in every direction as he tried to understand what he was supposed to be doing. Parked on the other side of the dock was a large, open crate, and the crew seemed busy carrying the smaller crates from inside of it onto the ship. Rolling up his sleeves, Swift joined the line of men that marched from the ramp of the ship to the cargo. But when he stepped forward and tried his hand at lifting a crate, he found that it was too heavy. With all his might, he managed to drag it to the edge of the stack and lower it to the ground where it was out of the way. But no matter how he positioned his hands, or focused the weight in his knees, he couldn't seem to lift it. He offhandedly wondered what could have been inside to make it so heavy. Perhaps a liquid, or papers, or actual bricks. Giving up on trying to lift it, he settled for turning it onto its side with a thud, and doing this repeatedly until he reached the foot of the ramp. There wasn't a man on the ground or on the deck who wasn't already distracted by the clumsy spectacle, but their attention turned to fascination as they watched him struggle to rotate it at such a sharp angle. At the top of the ramp, two men were making a bet on whether he would make it all the way up or break a bone first. 

Sweat was rolling down his stomach as he slowly rotated the crate up the incline, struggling to keep it steady every time it hitched on a ridge. As he reached the top, he pushed the crate over the edge of the ramp, and came tumbling onto the deck with it.

"...What happens if he breaks a bone after he makes it?" one of the men whispered, staring very gravely at Swift who lay motionless on his back, not unlike a starfish.

"Then I win."

"Why? It's a draw, ain't it?"

"It ain't no draw and you knows it."

"I ain't know nothin!"

"Well I won't say no to that."

They stared at him for some time, until the man with the rifle began shouting at them again to hurry. But Swift was still flat on his back with a heavy crate on his arm, looking up at the sky as he waited for the pain in his spine to fade. When it was well enough that he could crawl back onto his feet, he pushed the crate to the corner of the deck with the rest, and he was starting again for the ramp when the captain's voice came from the helm, "Leave the rest! We can't take anymore!"

The man with the rifle began shouting to the men on the ground, "Leave the rest! We can't take anymore!" while the crew shoved their way onto the ramp as the ship parted from the dock. Swift watched in both shock and amusement as some of the men clung to ropes on the hull and scrambled up the sides, while another fell into the water with a shriek and paddled back to the dock. It occurred to him that he had no idea where they were sailing, or how long it would be until they came back, and he wished now that he had brought his pen and paper along with him.

_I'll have to find some when we arrive..._

The harbour dipped under the horizon as they sailed into open waters, where the waves were calm and the sky was a canvas of blue. In a corner of the deck, most of the crew was sitting in a circle and playing a game of cards. Meanwhile, the captain stood at the helm, looking through her spyglass. He was feeling a bit wistful as he leaned over the side of the ship and watched waves crash on the hull, but he was pulled out of his thoughts when someone called to him from the circle.

"Oi, string!"

_Why does everyone keep calling me string..._ he brooded.

"Come have a seat over here! It's hard to play with so many cheaters."

"I wasn't cheating!" another one shouted. "You're the cheat!"

"You were cheating and you knows it! We all knows it!"

They all shuffled to the side to make room for him as he sat down in the circle. A man with a beard larger than his face dealt him some cards, and he realised that he had no idea what they were playing. But it was too bothersome to ask, or to learn for that matter, so he would just pretend that he knew how to play whatever-it-was. As they went around the circle, drawing cards to drop in the middle, one of the men looked up at Swift and said to him, "You took quite a fall there earlier! You ain't break nothin' didja?"

Swift glanced up from his cards, a bit surprised by his question. "No."

The man hunched over and gripped the back of his head, leaving Swift to wonder why he seemed so upset by this answer. In contrast to him, a man sitting next to Swift seemed overjoyed and gave him a hearty pat on the back.

"That's good to hear! We were all worried! You don't seem to have your sea legs yet."

_I've never been on a boat,_ he thought.

The man sitting on his other side joined in patting him on the back. "We're your friends, string! We knows the sea like the queen knows her flamingo. Just ask us if you can't tells up from down!"

"We're your friends!" they all chimed in like happy drunks, save the one man who still seemed horribly distraught that Swift hadn't broken any bones.

When the rowdiness had died down, Swift looked up again from his cards. "I have a question, actually."

"What's that?"

"...What was the captain's name?"

"Captainice!" they chorused.

He paused, pursing his lips in thought. "Is that Captain _Ice_ , or Captain _Nice_?"

At that, the circle went silent. A few of them exchanged glances, before one of them leaned in and whispered, "We don't know. No one knows." He gave a nod in the direction of the helm. "Would you be the one to ask her?"

Swift leaned back on his hand and glanced at the helm. The captain's stare immediately shifted to him, but her head never turned. He froze, and for a moment he was too afraid to move. There was something in her eyes that made him feel like he was being struck down by lightning. He leaned into the circle again and hid himself behind the others, quietly shaking his head in understanding.

✻✻✻

For some time, they'd been sailing under the high sun that never seemed to move. It was so still that it was essentially useless as a measure of time at all, and he realised now that he hadn't even seen the nightfall yesterday before he fell asleep.

_Is this what it's like to live so far North? It's enough to drive you mad..._ he thought.

In the meantime, Swift had become very skilled at pretending to know how one plays _Serpent or Little Girl_ , so skilled that he was fanning himself with his cards and growing a bit bored of the charade when the ship suddenly took a sharp turn, and they all fell to the deck.

"Get up! Get up, you mock turtles!" the captain shouted from the helm. "They're coming for us!"

Swift watched as the crew flew into a panic, dropping their playing cards as they scattered around the deck like frightened mice. Scrambling to his feet, he watched the chaos unfold as men shouted to each other from across the ship. He ran to the side and looked out into the distance. There was, at first, nothing but water. Then, a minute later he saw a speck - a speck that was fast taking the form of a sail.

"Every crew to your stations!" came the captain's orders.

Swift spun around a few times in confusion, unsure what his station was, or how he could be of any help at all. But to ask in this atmosphere would have been suicide.

"Hide the goods!" she shouted.

A few members of the crew unfolded a large tarp with a texture like the deck, and began to spread it over the stack of crates. As he came over to help, he fell to the deck again when the ship took another sharp turn.

"They're catching up!" she shouted.

The crew began to repeat the captain's words to each other as they thundered around the deck, like echo chambers echoing to and from one another.

"They're catching up!"

"They're catching up!"

"They're catching up!"

"They're catching up!" 

"They're catching up!"

"The captain said they're catching up!"

"And they've got canons!" she added.

"They've got canons!"

"They've got canons!"

"They've got canons!" 

"They've got canons!"

"Ears and whiskers, they've got canons!"

Swift crawled back to the side of the ship, where the crew was crowding around to watch as their pursuers drew near. "Are they pirates?" he asked.

Laughter erupted around him as someone gave him a slap on the back. The ship was close enough now that he could make out the shape of the canons in its sides.

"Carroll's paws!" the captain cursed. "We'll go under at this rate!"

Gasps and cries of horror filled the air.

"Toss the dead weight!" she ordered them. "Get rid of anything useless!"

Footsteps thundered across the deck again as the crew echoed her orders to each other, lifting heavy things in pairs of two and tossing them over the side of the ship. Swift watched as barrels and boxes and jars flew over the side. And before he could grasp what was happening, he felt himself being raised by four hands, and plunged into the water. Frantically kicking against the current, he splashed back up to the surface, more offended than he'd ever been in his life when he found himself among the things they'd tossed overboard.

"Some friends!" he spat, grabbing hold of a barrel.

For a while, he floated in the water, watching the other ship approach. The waves grew restless as its shadow crept over him, and the glint of the sun disappeared behind its sails.

✻✻✻

He sat, shivering, in a puddle of salt water, with his feet bound together and his hands tied to the mast. The crew had formed a cautious circle around him, as if restraining him with ropes had not been enough.

"He's over here, Admiraloaf!"

The circle parted as a pair of heavy boots clomped across the deck. A tall man with an arrogant expression stepped into the centre, and stared down his nose at Swift.

"Is it Admiral Loaf? Or Admiral Oaf...?" Swift muttered to himself. He snapped to attention when the admiral began to address him very sternly.

"Where are they headed? Out with it!"

Swift blanked. "Who?"

The admiral stomped his boot on the deck, startling him. "Don't play mock turtle with me, pirate!"

He stared up at the admiral in disbelief. "I'm... not a pirate."

"That's exactly what a pirate _would_ say."

"And what would a _not-pirate_ say, then?" he scowled, feeling his patience slip away.

The admiral thought about it for a moment, then said with conviction, "Perhaps, something pleasant. Perhaps he would inquire as to my health, or make a comment about the weather."

Swift thought to himself that he may have done that as well, had he not been fished up like a clam and tied to the mast.

The admiral stroked his chin. "If you tell us where they're going, we'll reward you handsomely."

"I don't know!" he snapped, fed up with his insistence. "I told you, I'm not a pirate!"

The crew began to murmur to themselves, and even the admiral seemed to be having doubts. At that moment, one of the sailors shuffled across the circle, and whispered into the admiral's ear, "Make him vote."

"Make him _what?"_ he squawked.

"I read, once, that pirates can't vote."

"Are you sure?"

The sailor nodded. "Sure as ferrets are ferrets. It was in a newspaper. Caused quite a big stir at the time. All those pirate apologists saying it's too bad that pirates can't vote."

The admiral mulled it over for a bit, then turned to the sailor and said, "If you're wrong, may the queen's knave cut off your head." He stomped his boot on the deck again. "We're holding a vote!" His eyes scanned the ship as he looked for something, anything they could vote on. Then at last he said, "I vote we ban pirate apologists! All those in favour, say aye! All those in not, say nay!"

There was a rumbling chorus of _ayes_ across the deck, before every eye turned to Swift.

"What say you?" the admiral sniffed.

Swift blinked up at his tense, twitching face. "...Aye."

The crew suddenly erupted in murmurs again, louder than the last time. They all clambered over each other to whisper to the admiral, "He voted. He voted. He voted-"

"Yes, I heard him." he scoffed, sounding quite irritated now as he turned back to Swift. "Well, if you're not a pirate, then what are you?"

Swift, who could barely feel his arms any longer, glumly looked down at his feet. "...Dead weight."

It was quiet at first, before the admiral nodded in understanding, and made his way back to the helm. "Untie him!" he shouted to the crew. "He's not a pirate! Just dead weight."

The circle of sailors scattered across the deck as they parroted the admiral's order.

"Dead weight!"

"Just dead weight!"

"He says he's just dead weight!" 

"Dead weight says the admiral!"

"Dead weight!"

Two sailors came to untie his binds, while Swift sulked in his puddle of saltwater.

✻✻✻

By the time his feet touched down on the harbour, the day was past. The pirates had made their escape, and he was as empty-handed now as he'd been in the morning, but with rope burns all along his wrists and salt in his hair.

> **[** I have since learned it is true that pirates cannot vote. Not in a physically restrictive sense as the sailors misinterpreted it, but in a legal sense. This is a subject of controversy in Carrollist politics and has made its rounds in recent debates. Personally, I wouldn't trust a sailor's vote any more than I'd trust a pirate's. They've all made it quite clear they're incapable of doing anything but fervently echoing the sentiments of their leaders. Perhaps, the constraint for voting should not be whether one has ever been a pirate, but whether one has ever had a critical thought. **]**

The scent of seawater stuck to his skin as he dragged his feet down the narrow street into town. Between the buildings lining the river, he passed by a stretch of grass behind a wooden gate. There was an old apple tree standing in the garden, and daisies lining the stone path that led into the tiny building at the end of the lot. His eyes were wide when he spotted the sign on the door that said: 

**Help Wanted**

"Caterpillar Nursery..." he read from the silver slate on the wall.

_Is it a nursery for caterpillars,_ he wondered as he opened the gate, _or for children?_

✻✻✻ 

Swift sat in a chair too small for an adult, with his legs close together and his hands folded in his lap. Across from him sat a young woman, sifting through papers. The ticking of the clock filled in the silence as he stared down at his feet.

"Swift sir?"

He looked up. "Yes?"

"Thank you for filling in an application."

He gave a nod.

Silence fell over them again as she carried on reading through his resume. Swift glanced around the room, at the shelves stacked with children's books, and the little chairs pushed into little tables, and the toys spilling out of cloud-painted chests.

"The last job you held was... a quality checker at a mechanics facility?"

"Yes," he said, snapping to attention.

"What exactly did they mechanise there?"

_Airplanes..._

"Pocket watches," he smiled.

She nodded in understanding, then tipped her head to the side in thought. "I'm afraid I've never heard of such a facility. Was it in the Underlands?"

"Yes," he said, certain that it was the answer she wanted to hear.

"You write here that in your spare time, you do maths to relax."

"Yes."

She smiled, looking him dead in the eye. "Why? Are you raving mad?"

Startled by the expression she said this with, he frantically shook his head.

"Well," she sighed, staring down at the page. "It might do the children good to learn some basic maths... How soon can you start?"

"Tomorrow!" he blurted.

She set the papers down on the table, and stood up with a bow. "I look forward to working with you, Swift sir."

His chair scraped against the floor as he scrambled onto his feet, bowing to her in the same manner. She brushed her hand over her ear, and stifled a giggle as he raised his head.

✻✻✻

His fingers slid down the glass as he peered into the bakery, going weak in the knees at the sight of their pastry display. There was a row of Bunberryburryborn tarts, beside a row of honey-baked bread, beside a row of little blueberry chocolate cakes, among others.

_Lucky bastards,_ he thought, looking at the customers sitting inside, stuffing their faces with custards and pies and creams and toasted sandwiches. His stomach whined as he imagined himself buying the entire row of tarts in the display, arranging them in a circle on the table, and chanting a spell to summon more of their sugary brethren to the mortal realm. Suddenly, he felt a paw pressing against his leg. Tearing his eyes away from the pastries, he looked down at the dog with its paws on his thigh, happily wagging its tail as it stuck out its tongue. Swift blinked back in surprise, wondering where the dog had come from. He crouched down to ruffle its ears and cheeks. Its paws came to rest in his lap as it nudged his face with its nose, and a smile tugged at his lips. "You remind me of my dog..." he mused, wondering to himself how long it would be until he could see him again - sitting in the doorway, wagging his tail as he waited for Swift to come inside.

"Bill!"

A sharp voice cut through his thoughts.

"Billiam! Billiam Bon Burnybart! What have you done now?"

_Billiam? Billiam and not William?_

The dog's owner came bolting down the street. She was wheezing terribly when she finally caught up with them, and bowed in apology. "I'm so sorry."

Swift shook his head. "It's not a problem."

She gave a smile as she coaxed the dog from his lap. "Come now, Bill. It's almost dinner time. How'd you like some fish?"

Swift stood up and watched the dog trot down the street beside its owner, until they turned the corner by the river. For a while, he stood in place, left without the will he needed to make his feet move.

The sun had shifted a little when he finally made it back to Hatt's apartment. String lights glowed on the roofs of closed shops and balconies, and on the rails of the loft when he stepped inside. The door clicked shut, and he came up the stairs to find Hatt lying on his stomach, reading a comic book on his bed. Curled up next to his side was a familiar, white ball of fluff.

_So it wasn't wild..._ he thought.

Hatt glanced over his shoulder, at Swift's mussed hair and panda-eyes.

"Ears and whiskers, Swift! You look awful," he said, sitting up.

Collapsing on the sofa, he sighed into his pillow. "It's been a long day..." he mumbled, half asleep before he could finish his thought.

✻✻✻

"Good morning, Swift sir!" they chorused in their childish drawls. A row of tiny heads all bowed to him in unison.

He bowed back, a bit startled by their enthusiasm, and more so when they suddenly dispersed and flooded the room, laughing and shrieking and spilling things off shelves and out of toy chests, while others ran outside to the garden. Some of the children looked about three or four years old, and some were so small they were hardly steady on their feet. Overwhelmed by their sound and their numbers, he turned to his new superior to ask what he should do, when a child suddenly came and took her by the hand.

"Alice miss! Come see my drawing!"

Before he could say a word, she was being led across the room to a tiny table where a group of children were doing crafts. He thought to ask her assistant instead, when he felt something curl around the edge of his hand.

"Swift sir, come be the rabbit."

"The rabbit...?" he asked, already being dragged into the garden.

The children had formed a circle in the grass, where she brought him into the centre and announced, "Swift sir is the rabbit!"

He looked around at all the children. "Um, what does the rabbit do?"

They began shouting instructions to him all at once, in such chaos that he couldn't hear a single word that was being said. And before he could make any sense of the game, they were all holding hands and circling around him, singing a strange song.

_"The rabbit's late to tea again,_

_the Queen will take his head and then,_

_the King will give him back a part,_

_if he reveals who stole the tart!"_

The circle dispersed as the children ran in every direction. He had no idea what sort of game they were playing, but judging from how they all clambered over each other to get away from him, he supposed he should be chasing them. All it took was a step in any direction for the children to start screaming with laughter and fleeing to another corner of the garden. He wandered over to the apple tree and caught a child by the hand. The others all pointed and laughed, "Gryphon little is caught! Gryphon little is caught!"

The child in thick, round glasses, (who was apparently Gryphon little), sulked as he sat himself under the apple tree.

When he'd caught all the children and herded them beneath the apple tree, they announced that Hatter little had been caught last, and was to be the rabbit in the next round. But Swift had already had more excitement than he needed in a day. As the children left to circle around Hatter little, he sat back against the trunk of the apple tree.

"I'll sit this one out," he said.

To his surprise, a few of the children then broke off from the circle and came to sit with him instead. One of them sat on his shoes, while another sat next to him, and another climbed into in his lap. He was a little caught off guard by how heavy such a tiny child could be.

"Swift sir, what's your favourite colour?"

"Mine? I..." he thought about it. "I like red, I guess."

"Me too!" she squealed.

"Me too," chimed the little girl in his lap. "Swift sir is a good animal."

He stared dumbly at her smiling face, taken aback by what he had just heard.

> **[** As hard as it may be for the reader of this journal to believe, the Carrollists do not morally separate humans from animals or plants. They consider humans comparable to every living organism on earth, and have no particular feelings of superiority regarding the human race, nor do they acknowledge the inherent misery of the human condition. They maintain the belief that humans construct and live in their habitats as any creature does, and they differentiate between them only for practical and scientific purposes, never for moral, spiritual, or philosophical reasons. As such, words like _human, animal,_ and _person_ are used interchangeably in conversation, with _animal_ being the most commonly used. **]**

"Swift sir is a good _person_ ," he corrected her.

His face went pale with shock when she gently patted him on the head, and corrected him back. "Silly, that's the same thing."

> **[** Ridiculous! How horribly she has been misled! I find it absurd that anyone can convince themselves humans and animals are equals. To say such a thing truly shows profound ignorance of one's own nature. Humans are clearly better! Or... clearly worse? It's... Well, I can't remember exactly what it was now... but it was definitely one of those two. **]**

✻✻✻

When the children had all eaten lunch, they came to sit at the large round table with Swift, who was tasked now with teaching them basics mathematics. Alice miss had given him only a drawing board and a marker, before she and her assistant had left for the break room.

Already feeling his bones bend under the weight of the challenge, he looked around the table, and hesitantly asked them, "Do you all know how to count?"

In the silence, a very small child, perhaps two, began mumbling quietly to herself, "Wan too fwee fo," she paused to take a breath, "fibe sic sebenine tin too fwee fo."

She took another breath, and Swift waited to see if she would continue, but she seemed to be finished.

"Um, that was very good," he said.

She smiled shyly and sat back in her chair. Suddenly, an older child raised his hand so high he shot out of his chair. "Actually! It was all wrong!"

"Well, it wasn't _all_ wrong," Swift frowned.

"It was, because-"

"Alright then," he cut in, too annoyed to let him finish. "How about we start from the beginning?"

He uncapped the marker and set the drawing board down on the table. Then he paused, wondering to himself if instead of drawing the numbers for them, it might be better to use something they had a sense for, like their hands.

"It's probably easier if we count on our fingers," he said, putting the marker down and holding out his thumb. "One..." He held up his index finger. "Two," and went on until he reached ten. The more times he did this, the more the children began to copy him and count along.

They counted up to ten together for a few minutes, before Swift said, "Great. Let's review, then. Alice little-"

> **[** It should be noted that for children, they do not tack on _miss_ or _sir_ , but _little_. Also, it appears that Alice is the most popular name for women, and Hatter is about as common as John. **]**

He decided he would start with an easy question, and held up ten fingers.

"How many fingers are these?" he asked her.

Alice little was sitting with her chin in her hand, swinging her feet under the table.

"All of them," she said.

"Well... yes, but I'm looking for a number."

"We're all looking for something," she sighed, turning to the window and gazing into the distance, like she'd lived a hundred years in that tiny body. "But will we ever find it?"

Swift ignored the sudden wave of existential despair that washed over him, assuring himself that she was only avoiding the question by spouting something she'd heard an adult say. He turned instead to another child. "Dinah little, can you tell me how many fingers these are?"

Dinah little was open-mouthed as she looked at his hands for a few seconds, then at her lap, then to the side as she twiddled her thumbs on the table.

"I swallowed a mandarin seed today," she said. "And it's raining. One day, I'll grow up to be a big, green mandarin tree."

Swift was all ready to give up and ask another child when Dinah little started to speak again.

"Last night," she went on. "I had a dream I learned the truth."

Swift blinked at her, as curious as he was afraid. "...The truth?"

"Yes," she nodded. "The truth. About life. About us. About the universe. It was scary," she twiddled her thumbs again, taking a deep breath as she stared into her lap. "I woke up and I was scared, because, when you knows the truth, you can't never ever forget the truth. And I was scared because, I knows that my life wouldn't never be the same."

Still as the dead, Swift listened to her story.

"I was worried that I couldn't go on anymore. But then I wen-ta-sleep again, and woke up in the morning and couldn't remember the truth anymore. So it's okay."

Silently losing his mind, Swift turned away from Dinah little, pretending he heard nothing as he asked another child, "Hatter little, how many fingers am I holding up?"

Hatter looked up. "I dunno." His gaze flitted to the ceiling in thought. "Have you ever taken a step back, and realised how much time you waste... worrying about things that don't matter?"

Swift choked up. He slowly sat forward in defeat, folding his hands into his lap. A minute passed in silence as he stared at the table.

"...No, I have not."

✻✻✻

"What's this?" Alice miss puzzled as he handed her the paper.

"My resignation."

> **[** Perhaps adults shouldn't vote at all. Perhaps children should be given the right to vote at birth, and stripped of it by the time they start to look like an adult. **]**

As he stepped out of the staff room, he saw that only two children were left in the nursery, waiting for their parents to pick them up. Alice little was sitting at the table, scribbling something on paper, and Hatter little was sitting on the floor and stacking blocks.

"What rhymes with flower?" she asked.

Hatter little looked up from his tower. "Why are you asking?"

"I'm ry-teeng a poem."

"Don't bother," he said. "In the future, you know, we'll all be connected through one giant consciousness, and we'll communicate through raw electrical pulses."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that we'll look back on our history and say, 'primitive humans were so stupid for thinking you could accurately communicate any complex idea through such a flawed and limited medium as words.' So you don't need to waste your time writing a poem."

"Oh! Okay."

She happily dropped the pen on the table and joined him on the floor to stack blocks. Fear gripped his soul as Swift staggered out of the door, wondering to himself what was in the water at the Caterpillar Nursery.

✻✻✻

He sat on the bench with his head tipped back and his heels digging into the grass. Clouds sailed by overhead, and the sun was as stagnant as ever. It had been two days since he began looking for work, and all he'd found was an existential crisis.

"Kids these days..." he muttered, hauling himself onto his feet. The air was unpleasantly sticky and hot, and he dragged his jumper behind him as he trudged down the street.

"Apples and rice..." he groaned, pausing by the bakery again to look through the window. The bell on the entrance door chimed as one of the employees stepped out and hung a sign on the door.

**Help Wanted**

His face lit up as he dropped his jumper on the ground. He rushed up to the door and gripped the sign.

"If I work here, can I eat here?" he asked with stars in his eyes.

She stared at him in surprise, then burst into laughter, giving him a hearty pat on the shoulder. "Of course you can!"

Swift gasped quietly to himself.

"Can you start two's day?"

He blinked at her. "...Tuesday?"

She laughed again, giving him another pat on the shoulder. "What in Carroll's name is a Tuesday? You sure are a strange one."

> **[** For those who are unfamiliar with the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there is a conversation in chapter nine that reads like this:
> 
> _‘And how many hours a day did you do lessons?’ said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject._
> 
> _‘Ten hours the first day,’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘nine the next, and so on.’_
> 
> _‘What a curious plan!’ exclaimed Alice._
> 
> _‘That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked: ‘because they lessen from day to day.’_
> 
> _This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. ‘Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?’_
> 
> _‘Of course it was,’ said the Mock Turtle._
> 
> _‘And how did you manage on the twelfth?’ Alice went on eagerly._
> 
> _‘That’s enough about lessons,’ the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone._
> 
> As such, the Carrollists count the days of the week like this: One's day, Two's day, Three's day, Four's day, Five's day, Six's day, Seven's day, Eight's day, Nine's day, Ten's day, Leven's day, where the first e has been dropped from the eleven in the last day. As the reader can well see, there are not seven, but eleven days in the week. Consequently, there are three weeks in each month, making them 33 days long. To solve the issue of having excess days in the year, they have done away with the month of December, and added two extra days to the month of November, making their calendar eleven months long. I am sure you can imagine, working for ten days with only one day of holiday in between is insufferable. However, it is of no little significance that due to the Gryphon's interruption, it was never revealed what became of the twelfth day. 
> 
> The dispute over the twelfth day has led some people to believe that the twelfth day, or in this case, One's day, is also a holiday, and has given birth to a branch of denominative Carrollism known as Lewicism. It is largely practiced in the Underlands, and passionately hated in the Wonderlands. The central government of South Wonderland has repeatedly denounced them as heathens, and has nearly ceased trade with the Underlands on several occasions throughout their history. Personally, I find it quite strange that two people can hold almost identical beliefs on every subject imaginable, but denounce each other as irredeemably stupid and wicked over a disagreement regarding such a relatively insignificant thing. Mind you, to an outsider, Carrollists and Lewicists are essentially the same. You would not notice a difference between them. And yet, their contempt for each other runs so deep, they speak ill of the other side even more than they they speak ill of the uncarrollists - or as we know them, atheists. 
> 
> I must admit, I have been hoping to cross paths with one of these so-called uncarrollists since I arrived. I would very much like to ask their opinion on the state of their society. **]**

✻✻✻

He settled into the sofa and pulled the blanket over his feet. Curiously, he watched as Hatt tucked a slice of bread under his pillow.

"You sleep with a slice of bread under your pillow?" Swift murmured.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"In case I get hungry when I'm sleeping," Hatt said, shuffling under the covers.

_That makes perfect sense..._ Swift thought as he drifted to sleep.


	4. One mustn't nap but in the high noon.

His hands and knees were dusted black. Only the hum of the time ship came through the silence where nothing moved, where nothing made a sound, where he was the only thing with a beating heart. He brushed ash over the body, wincing every time his fingers touched the decay. His thoughts flashed back to the last moments of the man's life, moments spent in agony and delirium, screaming at ghosts and clawing at his own skin. He took one last look at a face deformed beyond recognition, and covered it with ash before he folded his hands to pray.

He slowly rose to his feet and turned to the empty time ship. If he were to die now, there would be no one left to bury him, and no one left to see him off.

_Swift..._

Suddenly he felt something grip his ankle so tightly that he flinched in pain.

"Swift..."

He looked down, at the deformed face that had risen from the ash, at the full-moon eyes staring back at him.

"Swift... Don't leave me-"

He kicked himself awake, bolting upright on the sofa. His eyes darted around the room, seeing only the rabbit crouched on Hatt's vacant bed - and startled out of its wits. He looked down at his hands, and saw no ash. Sighing, he curled a fist against his hammering heart and sank back into the sofa.

✻✻✻

"First things first! You can't serve anyone in that sorry state!"

Startled by how loud she was, he gave a fervent nod. The boss, who had seemed so cheery yesterday when she laughed at his questions, was unexpectedly strict. She slipped into the room behind the counter, and came back with a folded set of new clothes.

_I don't much like green,_ he thought as she handed them to him.

"Go to the bath next-door and wash up! Come back when you've changed!"

At her commanding tone, Swift reflexively brought his feet together and gave a salute, only to catch himself a moment later and pretend he was just brushing hair out of his eyes with a rigidly flat hand. The boss gave him a slap under the shoulder before she hurried into the back room again. 

Behind the counter, the bakers were working like bees, shaping dough, cleaning the ovens, stocking cupboards, decorating cakes, arranging the glass display, packaging the first orders of the day. Swift watched their busy hands and offhandedly wondered when it was that he'd last taken a shower. Unless falling into the sea counted, he couldn't remember.

✻✻✻

He sank down to his eyes in the water, awing at the tall ceilings and the wide, stone baths. Communal bathhouses were something he'd only heard of in passing, skimmed over in history books, or caught glimpses of in old movies. And being that it was a weekday morning, he had almost the entire bathhouse to himself, and he could gawk at it to his heart's content without judgement. 

He sat back and closed his eyes in thought. Soon he would earn enough money to pay Hatt back for monopolising his sofa, with plenty to spare for his grandiose plan to try one of every pastry in the bakery's glass display, and maybe one of everything on the shelves, too. His mind filled with thoughts of the berry-stained-blue cake with a salty-cinnamon custard filling - what a strange and wondrous-looking cake it was. He began running numbers through his head, because a good plan was a well thought out plan; assuming that his stomach could stretch to hold about three litres of food, he could probably stuff himself with fifteen to twenty pastries and tiny cakes before he reached maximum capacity. _But will there be room left to breathe air,_ he brooded, considering that he might stomach a few more cakes if he did away with the frosting and the decorations on them. But he didn't like that idea, didn't like it one bit. A splash suddenly came from the corner of the bath, and he opened his eyes to see a black cat with a white spot sitting on the rim, pawing at its own reflection.

"Socialists..." he huffed to himself. "A cat? In a bath? This is what happens when money isn't an obstacle. The subhumans start to think they have rights."

He sat in the bath a while longer, fuming over the foolishness of the socialists, and attempting to rank them somewhere in his curated list of foolish people. He reasoned that they were smarter than fools who couldn't grasp the basic principle that rampant gun violence _could only be stopped_ by enabling more gun violence, but still dumber than fools who liked pineapple on their pizza. When his list was all in order, he climbed out of the bath and towelled off.

His sea salted clothes were bundled and shoved into a sack, and would stay there until he could ask Hatt where the socialists did their laundry. Setting his uniform down on the changing room bench, he began to dress. The trousers were a dark green and came just above the ankle. They matched the colour of the waist-apron which was stitched with the bakery logo - a loaf of bread with honey spread over the top and dripping down its side. The shirt of his uniform was pale green, collared, short-sleeved, and perfectly ridiculous when paired with the golden bowtie that matched the logo on his apron. Clipping the bowtie to his shirt, he stepped in front of the mirror to take a look at himself. 

_I look like a leprechaun,_ he moped, comforted only by the thought that his sister wasn't there to take pictures.

✻✻✻

"You'll be serving the sitting guests," the boss explained.

Swift stood before her now in his uniform, without a grain of salt clinging to his hair.

"Most of our guests buy something at the counter and leave, but around lunch, the sitting area gets very crowded with sandwich munchers."

"Sandwich munchers?" he asked.

"Yes - people who munch on sandwiches. When guests come inside the bakery to eat, it's your job to bring their orders to their tables, and wait on them if they need anything else."

Swift nodded as firmly as she spoke.

"Remember! Never insult a guest."

He nodded.

"Never ignore a guest."

He nodded.

"If a guest is angry, apologise, even if you don't know what you're apologising for."

He nodded, but with the slightest hesitation.

"Also," she added in a whisper, leaning in. "We've had something of a problem as of late." She nodded her head in the direction of the stairs that led down to the restrooms. "There's a group of knaves who come inside without buying anything, and use the restrooms to..." her voice now was closer to silence than sound, "...take naps."

Swift stared into space, running the words through his head a few times, trying to make sense of what they meant if she felt the need to whisper them. In any case, he gave a nod.

"You can't help but wonder what their parents are doing, and why they aren't keeping a closer eye on their children," she went on.

His eyes flitted up in thought, and he nodded again, with a bit more conviction now. Certainly he could understand that it was bad parenting to let your children sleep in public restrooms.

"I'm afraid it may be rather awkward for you, but if you happen to see them down there, you must shoo them out."

"I can do that," Swift said, with the confused confidence of someone who'd been tasked with something puzzlingly easy, like breathing consistently for ten seconds, or testing water to see if it was wet.

She gave him a hearty slap on the back, and stood upright. "Good sir! Your first assignment is to memorise the table numbers."

✻✻✻

Three plates were in fragile balance on his arms as he moved at a snail's pace to a table in the corner. He set the plates down before the guests, and judging by the looks on their faces, he could only assume that he'd served them all wrong. As they switched plates with each other, he backed away from the table with a bow. The guests began to murmur and laugh among each other as they bit into their sandwiches. Taking the cloth from the pocket of his apron, he wiped down the table beside them, where the last sandwich muncher had left a carpet of crumbs. The room was filled with the sound of trays sliding in and out of the oven, of flour and sugar being poured into mixing bowls and beaten with wooden spoons. Occasionally, the scent of vanilla or cinnamon or cardamom would rise into the air, making his stomach whine as he thought again of how badly he wanted a Bunberryburryborn tart after work. The end of the day was just too far away, because it wasn't _right now_.

"Order for table four," they called out from behind the counter, and he hurried to collect the plates. As he was carrying them to table four, the bells chimed, and another guest walked in.

"Welcome!" the bakers chorused.

Swift placed the cranberry-carrot toast on table four, with the assortment of cucumber, peach, and blackberry marmalades. Giving a bow, he backed away from the table and started for the counter again. But his feet came to a stop when he recognised the guest placing an order at the register. It was the immaculate nerd from before. He was wearing one of his exactly three shirts, and had a heavy book tucked under his arm. When their eyes met, Swift's first instinct was to laugh. But he bit his tongue and instead gave a perfectly courteous bow. The nerd nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looking him up and down again before he gave a shallow bow in return. When he had placed his order, he sat himself at the most isolated table he could find, and opened his book to a page somewhere in the middle. Swift was standing at the edge of the counter and observing him when they slid him another plate.

"Order for table seven."

He curiously looked down at the order, before lifting the plate onto the palm of his hand and carrying it over. As he slid the almond bread and pear butter onto the table, he peered over his head to see what he was reading. The word **_aristocracy_** popped out on the page, being such a long word among the others. But he barely had a moment to read anything before the world's most immaculate nerd felt his stare, and looked up.

"Can I help you?" he said, sounding more like he was complaining than asking a question.

Swift took a step back and gave a bow. "No. Thank you for your businerd."

"My what?"

"Business," he coughed. "Your business, sir."

Touching the rim of his glasses, he locked eyes with him. Swift was trapped in the tense silence, before at last he said, "I've never seen you at this bakery before. Have you worked here long?"

Swift straightened up, resting his hands at his sides. "I started working here today."

The nerd tapped at the page of his book in thought. "And you were recently looking for a room as well, without a flat in your pocket, if I'm not mistaken?"

Swift was quiet. He stared back at him with wide eyes and parted lips, unsure what he should say, or where these questions would lead.

"Could it be that you came here from the Underlands?" He slid his hand across the page and sat back in his chair. "Honestly, you stand out like red paint on a white rose tree."

At a loss for words, Swift shut his mouth. He didn't know why he had made such a remark, or why it had hit him with the impact of a train. Had he fooled himself into thinking he was blending in? He drew a breath to stutter a reply, when they called him again from the counter.

"Order for table two."

He took another step back, muttering an apology without knowing what for - as a good employee should. When he turned his back to table seven, his tense shoulders sank, and he moved quickly to deliver the cabbage and herring sandwich to table two before excusing himself to the restroom.

He plodded down the stairs and pushed open the door, pausing in front of the mirror when he caught his reflection in the corner of his eye.

**_You stand out..._ **

He leaned over the sink, fixing the part in his hair.

**_...like red paint on a white rose tree._ **

_What a ridiculous expression,_ he thought. _I've never seen a rose tree in my life, much less a white one..._ And yet, it terrified him, to think that everyone could see through him. Suddenly an odd sound cut into his thoughts. He looked up to the ceiling, then over his shoulder at the stalls.

> **[** There is something of a strange taboo among the Carrollists. It is by far their most intense fixation. It would not be an understatement to say that as a society, they are completely obsessed with it, and will both allude to it and find non-existent allusions to it in absolutely everything. **]**

He followed the sound to the stall in the corner, suspecting that it was the creak of a leaking pipe. When he swung the door open, he startled at the sight of a young man sitting on the toilet with his head tipped to the wall, snoring softly and mumbling to himself in his sleep.

> **[** It is generally believed that Alice's dream took place in the high noon, for the text reads, "The hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid," and they reason that the hottest and sleepiest part of the day must be when the sun is highest at noon. As such, the Carrollists believe that napping (being such a lazy yet tempting thing) is something one should only do in the high noon, when one may conceivably dream of Wonderland, as Alice did. **]**

"Sir... Sir!" Swift knocked on the wall. He jolted awake, swaying a bit from side to side in a daze. Then his gaze flickered up to Swift and he scrambled onto his feet.

> **[** Of course people, being people, will naturally nap at any hour of the day, not only in the high noon. The taboo around napping has led to an obsession of such immense proportions that it is difficult to find a work of fiction that does not romanticise napping to an unrealistic degree. It is the subject of their song lyrics, the centre of the paintings, the focus of so very much of their science, and the driving force behind one of the most profitable industries in all of the Wonderlands - pillows. 
> 
> I find it quite unsettling that something so instinctive to humans (and animals) has become such an intense fixation in a society. They even sell books and magazines filled with illustrations of people napping in different positions, in different places, with all sorts of odd pillows and strange blankets, and people fall asleep in private reading these. I can't understand it. Certainly, I can agree that napping feels very nice, but it would be absurd if I spent all my days lusting after a good nap!
> 
> What's more, they've convinced themselves through their endless scientific research in this field that it is actually perfectly instinctive to think of nothing but napping at every hour of the day, and they vehemently uphold this belief to counter the guilt imposed on them by their religious beliefs. The inner turmoil it stirs in every individual is really quite a complicated and nonsensical plight. Of course, not everyone is obsessed, and some are more obsessed than others. For example the elderly, who have a natural inclination towards it, nap more vigorously than the general population. However, I find their obsession with napping and the grandiose fantasies that result from it have actually led them to become somewhat dissatisfied with how unextraordinary napping really is. It is also important to note here that sleeping at night is not seen as sinful, but as necessary. It is napping, specifically, that is considered unnecessary and therefore greedy and sinful. **]**

The young man bowed his head profusely in apology. Blushing up to his ears, he shoved past Swift and made a dash for the stairs. Swift watched him clamber up the stairs and slam the door shut. He turned back to the toilet and stared at the seat, wondering to himself why anyone would choose to nap in such an uncomfortable place.

✻✻✻

"Hatt! Hatt!"

There was an incessant pounding on the door.

"Haaaaatt!"

He came down the stairs and undid the lock to find Pat standing on the doorstep, running in place.

"Hatt! Feed me!"

"Oh, uh..." he looked over his shoulder, and motioned to the cupboards. "There's fruit."

"Perfect. Fruit will make me strong."

Pat climbed onto the counter and rummaged through the cupboards, then took a seat with an armful of apples and pears. Hatt closed the now half-empty cupboards after him, and sat down in the other barstool.

"Did you spend all your money again?" Hatt asked him.

"No," he muttered with a mouthful of apple. "I'm _saving_ it this time. To buy a boat."

As unlikely as it seemed, Hatt took him seriously. "A boat? What are you going to do with a boat?"

"Tell everyone I have a boat," Pat said decidedly.

"Won't you sail it?"

"No, that would be tiresome." He plucked the stem from the apple and bit into the top. "By the way, what happened to the oddball from yesterday? The amnesiac. Did he shuffle off this mortal coil?"

"No, he's alive."

He looked up in thought. "Well, there's a shock. Where did he go?"

"Nowhere. He's been sleeping on the sofa."

At this, Pat dropped his apple on the counter, looking indignantly at Hatt.

"I can't believe you're giving him the sofa...? When I'm here...? Trying to save money to buy a boat...? Do you know how much faster I could save if I stopped paying rent?"

Hatt's mouth hung open in surprise. He hadn't expected him to throw such a fit. "You can ask him if he'll share," he said, glancing up at the loft. "But it might be a tight fit."

"I don't want to share with an amnesiac," Pat huffed. "He probably smells."

"Like what?"

"Like amnesia."

Hatt cupped his chin and stared down at the floor in thought. "Now that you mention it... he did smell a bit yesterday."

"I knew it. See? That's the smell of amnesia. What was it like?"

There was a long pause before Hatt looked up again. "...The ocean."

✻✻✻

The bakery was quiet. Guests had stopped coming in, and everyone had gone home aside from Swift, the boss, and the two bakers who stayed behind to clean the kitchen. Throwing her wipe down, one of the bakers slumped over the counter, wailing loudly about the pain in her feet.

"I'm going home and entering my eternal sleep," she groaned.

The boss gave her an audible slap on the back, sending her jolting over the counter.

"Good work, Mary-Ann! You, too, Swift, Hare."

Swift stood at the end of the counter, watching the pendulum swing as the clock ticked away to closing time. In only a few seconds, he could finally have his Bunberryburryborn tart.

_Tick._

"Tart..." he whispered.

_Tick._

"Tart."

_Tick._

"Tart...!"

The clock chimed nine. Mary-Ann heaved a sigh and went to collect her bag from the back room. In contrast to her zombie trudge, Swift had a skip in his step as he came around the counter, and slid open the glass display to claim his tart.

"Swift-"

An arm suddenly came around his shoulder. The boss pulled him along as she walked, until the distance between him and the glass display felt as hopeless as the distance between Jack and Rose in _The Fancy Boat Sank and Flagrant Classism Killed Us All_.

"How was your first day?" she asked, stopping when they reached the sitting area.

He glanced wistfully over his shoulder at the tarts, and he was hurried and curt in his reply when he said, "Fine."

"Good sir! You did well for your first day."

"Thanks..." he mumbled, only half-present.

"But we did receive a few comments from our guests..."

Swift snapped out of his daze at the sound of trouble. "...Comments?"

"Yes," she said in an almost-whisper, lowering her head as she met his eye. She lifted her arm off his shoulder and stood upright. "You came here from the Underlands, did you not?"

His eyes flitted to the side in thought. It was clear that _yes_ was the answer she expected to hear, but he couldn't say whether it was the answer she wanted to hear. Taking his chances, he gave a tentative nod.

Her grave curiosity suddenly turned to something of pity. "I suppose their culture is very different from ours."

> **[** It appears that my interactions with Carrollist women have caused me to pick up mannerisms that are considered exclusively feminine, much to the amusement of everyone who has interacted with me during my time here. **]**

Swift wordlessly stared back at her. He knew nothing about Underland culture, but he supposed distant societies that had been diverging for hundreds of years probably differed in some ways.

"They said you bowed rather strange," she went on.

He suddenly flashed back to his interview with Alice miss, and to _all_ the people and guests who had chuckled at him when he bowed.

> **[** I mentioned in my previous entries that Carrollists bow whilst holding a peace sign to their chest. However, I had failed to notice that when men bow, they do not hold a peace sign to their chest, but in fact to their hip. **]**

"How do they bow in the Underlands?" she asked, tipping her head to the side in wonder.

Swift choked on air. In the first place, he wasn't sure they bowed in the Underlands at all. "They..." He nervously looked around the room. "They do this," he said, pressing his index finger above his lip like a moustache, and placing his other hand on his hip as he gave a shallow bow.

"Oh!" she cried, clapping her hands together. "Like a teapot! How lovely!"

He raised his head, feeling his face grow hot when he saw the bakers staring at him with an intense fascination from behind the counter.

_You two already collected your things,_ shouted the voice in his head, _just leave!_

> **[** I had also failed to notice that women in Carrollist society sit with their left foot crossed over the right, and men with their right foot crossed over the left. Also, women's fashion consists of red tones, and men's fashion of green, simply because the two colours are opposites. Blue, which is believed to be the true colour of Alice's dress, is considered a neutral colour, and is reserved for religious occasions and traditional attire. It seems I've made a right fool of myself to these people by walking around with a red shirt under my jumper. Also, it is apparently considered shameless behaviour for anyone to yawn in public. **]**

"I thought they bowed with their foot behind them," said Mary-Ann. "Kind of like a curtsey."

Swift cleared his throat, pretending to be insulted. "Yes, _well_ , Mary-Ann, in the settlements of yeast Underland, we pay tribute to the proud teapot." He paused, furrowing his brow. _Did I say east,_ he wondered, _or yeast?_

The boss looked at him with a brooding expression. "Where are the yeast settlements?"

_I said yeast! Awful!_

He rolled his eyes, like it was the dumbest question. "In the yeast of course."

Hare leaned over the counter. "Do you perhaps mean to say the _east_ settlements?"

Swift cast him a curious glance. "The east?" He curled his hand under his chin and looked down at the floor, pretending to be deep in thought. "I see... In the Wonderlands, they drop the y in yeast. That is very interesting... But, you know-" he looked up, "-they call it the yeast because that's where they grow all the yeast. East is simply a mispronunciation of the word _yeast_."

The boss seemed very much convinced of this. "Ahh! How curious!"

"Oh... that makes sense," Mary-Ann mumbled to herself, half asleep on the counter.

> **[** Also, when women laugh, they touch their ear. Men, when they laugh, touch their chin. Due to a fashion trend some thirty years ago, it is considered feminine to shave your head bald. Ageing men combat this by transitioning to a wig as soon as the first patch of hair on their head starts growing too thin. Also, women must set their chopsticks down on their left side when they finish eating, and men must set them down on the right. The list of superficial and wholly man-made distinctions is endless. And to what purpose? They could just as well cross their feet in any way they please! The men and the women go to such bothersome lengths to seem so extremely different from each other, because in truth, they are so extremely similar. A Carrollist is a Carrollist, man or woman. Honestly, what a nuisance their sex-specific rules are! It's an exhausting effort that has no practical purpose! And yet, I am forced to learn and adhere to these nonsensical mannerisms for fear of being ostracised if I ignore them! 
> 
> What's truly puzzling is not only the existence of these rules, but that they are given so much importance, to the point where the Carrollists believe that they are actually human nature. You would drive yourself quite mad trying to convince them that men are not all born with an inherent love of the colour green and a habit of crossing their feet exclusively in one direction. Even more mad is that Carrollist women casually sit with their legs apart... Shameless... How can they allow this... **]**

✻✻✻

Hugging his take-home box with one hand, he used the other to practice making a peace sign at his hip. "Right foot..." he mumbled to himself, pausing at the street corner to cross his right foot over his left. "Right over left..."

As he turned the corner, he replayed in his head all the instances where people had laughed at him in this odd town, and his face began to feel uncomfortably hot again.

✻✻✻

He stepped inside and shut the door. The smell of rice filled the room again as the pot steamed on the stove. Pulling off his shoes, he remembered what the boss had told him.

"...I'm back," he called, looking up at the loft.

There was a flurry of footsteps before Hatt suddenly leaned over the railing, gaping at him in surprise. "...Welcome back!"

_He replied just like she said,_ he thought. It occurred to him now how much of their culture he didn't understand - and hadn't even tried to understand. He stared up at Hatt for a moment, before he remembered the box under his arm.

"Oh," he held it up for him to see. "This is for you."

✻✻✻

_What is this made of,_ Swift wondered, squinting at the glass.

He was sat at the counter, drinking a glass of mysterious not-milk. Hatt sat next to him, digging into his Bunberryburryborn tart with a special tart spoon - a jagged, ladle-like thing made for scooping berries and cutting into the pancake base. As much as Swift would have liked to know where the not-milk came from, there were matters of greater importance on his mind. Decidedly, he set his glass of not-milk down on the counter.

"Hatt-"

Hatt looked up with a mouthful of custard. "Hm?"

"Can you... teach me how to be social?"

Swallowing the mouthful of custard, he lowered his spoon. "To be social?"

"Yeah, I..." Swift fidgeted in his chair, looking down at his lap. "The truth is... I don't have amnesia. I actually... grew up in a cave."

_That's ridiculous,_ chided the voice in his head. _That's even more ridiculous than amnesia!_

The room was silent, and Swift didn't have the nerve to lift his head and read Hatt's expression. Suddenly a hand came to rest on his shoulder.

"That's rough," he said, looking awfully sympathetic. Then, like a switch had flipped, his face lit up as he pointed at him. "Ah! It's just like! Just like that one kid! From..." he snapped his fingers in his attempt to remember "From The Jungle Boob!"

_"Book,"_ Swift corrected him.

Hatt bounced up and down in his chair. "Yeah! That one! Ah... That's amazing..."

As far as he could remember, Mowgli didn't grow up in a cave. But more than that, he was shocked that Hatt had so readily believed him. Sighing, he leaned against the edge of the counter. "So? Can you teach me?"

Hatt's excitement faded as he looked down in thought. "What am I trying to teach you again?"

"How to make people like me."

Hatt raised his head with a big smile, and patted him on the shoulder. "Oh, no, you don't need any lessons in that. I like you plenty the way you are."

Silence fell over them. Swift bit his lip, trying to blink away the tears beading in his eyes. A moment later, Hatt jolted up in his seat, reflexively shielding the tart when Swift slammed his fists on the counter and threw his head down to hide his tears.

> **[** Hatt is truly, indisputably, the best idiot... **]**


	5. The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

The man behind the door fixed his tie and straightened his stack of flyers.

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

He knocked on the door again, beginning to wonder if anyone was home. A few seconds later, there was a shuffling from inside. The door slowly creaked open. He peered into the darkness behind it, feeling as if he were gazing into a bottomless abyss. When the door had opened completely, the sun cast its light on a pale young man who shrank away from the morning like a vampire. His hair was mussed and hanging over his eyes - that were more shut than open - and he clung to the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. 

"Yes..." he rasped.

Clearing his throat, he flashed him a twinkling smile and held out a flyer. "Good morning, sir! I would like to discuss with you, today, the re-election of our esteemed party leader, Mite E. Bighip O'crit, and his running mate, Kill'em Ifit Sprofitable. As you know, we are working tirelessly to-"

Before he could finish, the door slammed shut in his face, crinkling the flyer. Swift turned around and stomped up the stairs. With a loud huff, he threw himself back down on the sofa.

> **[** I hate it when politicians try to sell their position at your door like it's miracle-growth shampoo. **]**

✻✻✻

Swift leaned his elbow on the counter, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

"Swift!" Mary-Ann barked. "Have some decency! For Carroll's sake!"

He flinched and dropped his hands onto the counter.

She sighed, shaking her head. "You look like you're standing on your last legs."

_Who wouldn't be standing on their last legs after nine consecutive days of work,_ he thought. _And how did such a stupid phrase survive the evolution of the English language? If it were 'standing on your last leg' it would make sense, because if I lost a leg, I would certainly be standing on my last. But the use of the plural, 'last legs' implies that at some point, I had more than two legs, and I am now left standing on my last two. I have seen many things in my life, but I have never seen a human with a number of legs greater than two. What's more-_

He lurched forward when the boss suddenly gave him a slap on the back. "Look alive, Swift! You've got the end of the day to look forward to!"

His gaze wandered up to the sky behind the window. _Ah, that's right..._ His thoughts floated on a cloud to a faraway place - an ornate room with high ceilings painted like the milky way, and floors like still waters. At the back of the room, he sat on a throne built of glazed mint leaf armrests, pancake seat cushions filled with custard, and a gilded frame of hardened chocolate. He held a long and proud sword stacked with Bunberryburryborn tarts, and he would not hesitate to imprison the next fool who dared to call his sword an oversized skewer. As he bit into a tart, he looked out the window to the fields where his people toiled all day long under the fiery biscuit sun, watering the tarts sprouting from the ground. _Bless-ed be this land! For the tart deities have-_

"Swift. Swift!"

He snapped out of his fantasy and faced forward. "Huh?"

"We're nearly out of potato flour," said Hare, poking his head out from the back room. "Can you run and get some? I'll cover your station while you're out."

"Um... sure."

Swift looked around the room a bit helplessly. Before he could think to ask, Hare called to him again from the back, "Just take a few flats from the register!"

He came around the counter and slid open the register, folding a few flats into his pocket. As he untied his apron, a hand rested on his shoulder.

"Oh, Swift, since you're going out-"

✻✻✻

"How to prep for your nap... Number one best seller," he read off the book cover in the shop window. Several questions came to mind, but more than anything, he was astonished by how thick the book was. A cyclist coming down the street sounded their bell at him, and he stepped under the roof of the shop as they rushed by. "Turn left at the shoe repair..." he mumbled, reading from the scrap of paper in his hand.

The streets nearing the centre of the city were nothing short of a maze to him. A sharp turn behind a small building, into a stretch of pavement that felt more like margins between buildings than an alley, led into a bustling street tucked between rows of buildings, with staircases going up and down into parallel streets above and below the ground. Daylight hardly reached their eyes, and the lights strung on the roofs and signs glowed brightly even in the afternoon. The Carrollists, he thought, were not ones to waste space. Every square unit that was large enough to stand in was used for _something_. And it occurred to him now that every advertiser in the leasing office was among the small minority of people who actually had room to spare, and who felt the need to make efficient use of it. It didn't seem strange any longer that so many people could live in a city with a diameter of only six miles.

He wandered down the odd street until at last he spotted a shoe repair sign extending from the wall, and he turned left into another alley. He emerged into a circle of buildings where the alley he came in through seemed to be the only entrance and the only exit. Across from him on the other side of the circle was a neon blue sign that read _Underland Grocer_. And it was the only building he'd seen yet with a single sign on the ground floor, and no additional signs on the floors stacking up to the sky.

_Does that whole building belong to the grocer...?_

Where he came from, it was ordinary for a business to own the building it operated in, however large. But in Wonderland, it was such a strange sight that he was almost intimidated by it. His mouth hung open as he walked up to the entrance and pushed open the heavy, wooden door. 

On either side of the store were staircases leading to the upper and lower floors, and by the entrance wall beside a stack of woven shopping baskets was a directory of the aisles on each level. Glancing at his list, he skimmed the directory.

_Grains... Grains... second floor._

He started for the stairs, then paused when he passed by the shelves of chilled drinks. He peered into the frosty glass at the assortments of juices and not-milks. There was a not-milk brand made from soybeans, and another made from hemp seeds, and another made from coconuts. The bottle he recognised from Hatt's icebox had a sign hanging above it that read _Home-Grown Oat Milk._

_So that's what it was..._

He took another look at his list, and headed up the stairs to the grain aisles.

"Rice flour... Oat flour... Wheat flour..." he mumbled, looking the shelves up and down as he came down the aisle. "Potato flour."

With the bag of flour on his shoulder, he hurried into the next aisle to pick up three sacks of sweet rice. As he stumbled past the snack aisle, carrying half his weight in grains, he paused at the sight of someone sitting on the floor with a box of butter biscuits torn open on his lap, and with another already empty box at his feet. His face seemed oddly familiar, and Swift stared at him for a minute as he tried to place him in his memories.

_Oh! That's..._

It was the artful human disaster he'd stepped over in the owl's domain. He had more bandages on his hands and knots in his hair than he did the last time, and worse, he was getting crumbs all over the floor as he stuffed his face with stolen snacks. Swift shook his head and started up the stairs.

_Good-for-nothing..._

Under the weight of all the rice, the climb up the stairs felt as intense as the pressure he imagined people felt climbing the summit of Mount Everest. He cursed his naivety, wishing he'd taken a basket when he had the chance. At the very least he could have slid the basket across the floor if it was too heavy to carry. As he wandered down the preserves aisle, he peered over the mountain of rice in his arms and cautiously stretched his hand to grab a jar of lantern fruit jelly.

The groceries tumbled out of his arms as he leaned over the checkout counter, and read through his list again to make sure he hadn't missed anything. "Potato flour, sweet rice, lantern fruit jelly, banana jelly, cocoa powder, mint extract, brown sugar..."

Sighing, he pocketed the list and looked up to find there was only one person ahead of him in the line, and it was none other than mister butter-biscuit. He was holding up an odd tin branded with a caterpillar logo, like the empty one he'd found under Hatt's sink.

"I ain't got no money today... could I just take this?" he asked.

The cashier shook her head. "I'm afraid not, sir."

"I can come back and pay for it tomorrow," he said. "I promise you, you have my word."

The cashier, still shaking her head, slowly reached for the tin and pulled it out of his hand. If Swift's arms hadn't been so tired from heaving rice up and down the stairs, he would have covered his face to hide the secondhand embarrassment.

✻✻✻

He came down the street to the bakery, dragging an unreasonably heavy tote of groceries behind him when he slowed to a stop. There was a crowd gathered outside the door of an apartment complex, and on a stepladder at the centre of the crowd was a man in a very lavish, satin suit, whose voice somehow sounded calm and kind even when he shouted. Curiously, Swift crossed the street and stood at the edge of the crowd.

"The system isn't working," the man chided, reminding Swift a bit of his grandfather when he rambled. "Every Leven's day, our system comes to an almost complete stop, driving down our production, our work ethic, driving down our entire economy! It would benefit _everyone_ if we made the switch to a better, good, much more gooder system where we take every _other_ Leven's day off. I have spoken with numerous psychologists about it, and they have overwhelmingly confirmed the social and mental benefits of working longer weeks and longer hours with less rest. I have the science right here, right _here_ -" he smacked the back of his hand against the paper he was holding, but Swift couldn't see much of anything on it. "And on the topic of science, I say it's high time that we ban such grand words from our education system. Words like science, latitude, longitude, democracy, integrity - they are corrupting us to the core. Grand words give birth to grand ideas - and to grand hubris! Don't you think it would be better for everyone if the youths today learned a bit more humility and a few less grand words?" The crowd clapped in agreement. "And when it comes to the books we provide our children - if we did not insist on upholding the outdated tradition of including at least one picture in every book, we could drive down the cost of our printing by millions! _Millions!_ I have the numbers right here, right _here_ -" he smacked his hand against the paper again, which also didn't appear to have any numbers on it. "Moreover, education should not be a taxpayer funded system. We are crippling ourselves economically in the pursuit of educating children who do not want to be educated at all. Just look at history! Public education has never worked! It has been a disastrous failure in every historic nation that implemented it! Look at old Germany! Britain! The United States! Mesopotamia! Public education was at the root of all their economic declines! We shan't repeat their mistakes!"

The crowd clapped passionately at his tirade, meanwhile Swift's eyes nearly rolled into the back of his head. As a person who was born in that historic United States, exactly 698 years ago, he knew better than any Carrollist that public education in the United States was an asset, not a menace, and that the cost of educating American children had never been the source of any great economic decline. Also, as a person who sat through years of public education, he knew very well that Mesopotamia never had such a system. But more than anything, he wondered why they were clapping for a man who seemed to object to every principle their society was built on.

"What about the pirates?" someone shouted from the crowd.

"Off with their heads!" he cried, and the crowd erupted in cheers.

> **[** I find it amusing how the Carrollists fear and despise the Queen in Lewis Carroll's book because she is pompous, thoughtless, inhumane, and as far as they are concerned, every evil in the world. I think anyone can agree that she is really very antagonistic. Yet when they disagree with someone, they embody that very Queen, down to the finest detail. **]**

Breaking away from the crowd, he dragged the groceries across the street to the bakery, and did not look back.

✻✻✻

Swift was standing on the tips of his toes and piling sacks of rice onto the shelves in the backroom. As he rested on his heels, he brushed against the bags on the next shelf down, and a folded paper poking out of Mary-Ann's duffel fell to the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, the words in the corner of the page caught his eye.

**_A First-Wave Romance_ **

Curiously, he unfolded it and found something of an outline for a story.

**_Summary of chapter 1:_ ** _The human I wish to monopolise is being monopolised by somebody else. It is hurting me because so much of my self-worth is tied to whether or not I am in a mutually monopolising relationship with a human I am in some capacity fond of. Also because I want to experience physical intimacy with them very badly but cannot because as previously stated, they are being monopolised._

**_Summary of chapter 2:_ ** _I have just won an internationally recognised award for my decade-long efforts in philanthropy, and yet the only part of my day that I will reflect on or care about is the split second where our eyes met from across the room. I begin to forget my identity as my wish to monopolise this human grows ever stronger._

**_Summary of chapter 3:_ ** _Their current monopoly is destabilising because we touched lips. It is literally all I think about now. I have been alive for twenty-four years and I have seen incredible things and achieved incredible feats, but somehow the fact that our lips touched is now the most important thing that has ever happened to me. I know that I am being dramatic. But something as natural and unextraordinary as pressing one part of your body against someone else's would not matter unless I was being dramatic, and society has taught me that one must always be very dramatic about such matters. But until they are mine, I will fixate on this one, single desire until I am fully consumed by my distress and can no longer function. Now... now, I am finally someone! I am in love!_

**_Summary of chapter 4:_ ** _The human I wish to possess has also ceased to function as a result of their dramatics. They are deliberating over the option to discontinue their current monopoly and monopolise me instead. I continue to brood in my cave._

**_Summary of chapter 5:_ ** _A decision has been made. We will live happily ever after as we physically, mentally, and emotionally monopolise each other as well as two naturally polygamous animals reasonably can. I have forgotten who I was before, and I have forgotten everything that used to matter to me. Nothing matters now except for this... monopoly... nay, love! Love! O, who knew! It is everything I never wanted until society and every work of fiction in existence told me to want it! It is a refined, mature desire that children simply cannot understand, but that is acquired with age, like a taste for_ _bitter shit-water that burns your throat and impedes your motor skills_ _(note: check dictionary and replace with the actual word). O, love! Love... Forever... O..._

Swift was stupid with shock as he stared at the page. Suddenly, Mary-Ann stepped into the doorway.

"Swift, there's an order for tabl-"

She paused when he startled at her voice, and her attention shifted to the paper in his hands.

"Is that my-"

Swift shook his head. He folded the page back up. "Oh... no, no... I wasn't... I mean, I didn't intend to-"

Mary-Ann marched up to him and snatched it away, hiding it behind her back. "Serpent! You sneaky, egg-eating serpent!"

He took a step back to put some distance between them. Pouting to herself, Mary-Ann held the paper up and glanced over it. She looked a bit glum when she said, "It's not even finished yet," and put it back in her duffel.

"Um, I'm sorry, really, I didn't mean to sneak."

Mary-Ann crossed her arms over her chest, as if wondering what to do with him now. After some consideration, she mumbled back, "Well... since you read it... what did you think?"

Swift met her stare. "It was..." There was an awkward silence as he thought it over. His gaze sank to the floor. "...Very well-researched."

✻✻✻

"Spoon... Spoon... Spoon..."

He scoured the underside of the counter for a tart spoon, and hurried back to the table where his tart was waiting for him on a plate. Hare, who was the only other person left in the shop, threw his wipe down in the sink and went to hang the closing sign on the door.

"You sure like those tarts," he remarked, slipping into the back room to change out of his uniform.

His words fell on deaf ears as Swift shovelled spoonfuls of custard into his mouth, too absorbed in the art of eating it correctly to listen. It wasn't until the bell chimed that he looked up, and saw an old man aimlessly wander into the shop. His eyes were unusually void, and he repeatedly tried to slip his hands into his pockets, without seeming to realise that his trousers didn't have any pockets at all. Swift watched him saunter into the sitting area, leaving an odd scent in his trail as he took a seat by the window without ordering anything.

"Um..." Putting his spoon down, Swift cautiously approached the table. "Sir... Is there anything you'd like to order?"

The man didn't seem to notice that Swift was speaking to him. He didn't seem to notice his presence at all, and Swift found it a little eerie. Before he could ask again, Hare suddenly came up from behind him and slammed his hand on the table. "SIR!"

At his shout, the man languidly turned his head. "Yes?"

"There is an establishment next-door. We only serve baked goods here."

"Is that so?" he smiled, as if Hare was a child explaining to him the complex moral themes in his macaroni art. His gaze shifted to the window again, and he leaned back in his seat. "That's very nice."

Hare turned to Swift with a sigh. "Can you take him there? It's in the building next to us, on the right. Second floor."

Swift looked wistfully over his shoulder at the half-finished tart, then back at Hare. Reluctantly, he gave a nod, and coaxed the man to stand. Placing a hand on his back, he led him out of the bakery and up the flight of stairs to the second floor of the next-door building. When he opened the door, a wall of smoke hit him so hard he nearly stumbled back. Taking his hand off the man's back, he started down the steps, only to be caught by the wrist.

"Why don't you have a puff, string?"

Swift firmly shook his head, unsure what he was puffing, or why everyone kept calling him string, but he was adamant that whatever it was he would not allow it to come between him and his unfinished tart. Taking another step down the stairs, he tried to twist his hand out of the man's grip. "No, I'd rather not-"

"Don't be a bore now!"

He seemed awfully offended by his refusal, and his grip tightened as he dragged Swift back up the steps and through the door. Grabbing onto the door handle, Swift planted his heels on the floor and tried again to shake him off. "I have important business to attend to," he snapped, "if you please!"

It was a hazy room filled with round tables and pillows, and shaded windows that kept the sun out. Men and women were sitting in circles, sharing hookahs and looking very much half-asleep. He'd never seen anything like it, and if he was being honest with himself, he was actually very frightened by it.

_What is this..._ he wondered. _A drug den...?_

"Ah lighten up, string! No one likes a spoilsport!"

Dragging his feet across the carpet, he tried again to shake his wrist free.

"No one likes a pushy old fart, either!" he huffed. "Now, if you'll excuse me!"

> **[** Considering the extent to which they have demonised something as harmless as napping, I find it strange that Carrollists condone such an offensive habit. **]**

By the time he'd wrestled himself away, the smoke in the room had left him with a strange feeling. Slapping himself a few times on the cheek, he hurried down the stairs to finish his tart.

> **[** As it turns out, the tin with the caterpillar logo is popular brand of packaged opium. It's sold in almost every grocery and corner shop. Frankly, after observing their habits and the public's stance on the matter, I am inclined to say that as a society they have an opium smoking addiction. Not only is such a dangerous habit perfectly legal, but it is sociable and completely normalised. Choosing not to poison yourself is _actually_ seen as unusual and antisocial. **]**

The bell on the door chimed as he stomped inside, and indignantly parked himself in his chair. He glanced up at the clock as he reached for his spoon, to find the table had already been cleared.

"Swift? Are you still around?" Hare called from behind the counter, where he was drying the dishes and stacking them in the cupboard. "I thought you went home."

Hare nearly dropped a plate in surprise when Swift looked over his shoulder with tears in his eyes, wearing the ugliest pout he'd ever seen.

"I came back to finish my tart," he sulked.

"...Tart?" Hare lifted the plate with his half-finished tart off the counter. "What are you crying for? It's right here."

"Oh..."

> **[** I have since wondered to myself why their government allows people to smoke themselves stupid, and upon further research I learned that at one point in their history, its adverse affects were publicly denounced and opium in every form was banned. However, the people soon rioted and the ban was lifted. I believe the government has continued to allow it because the production and sale of opium is an enormous cog in their economic machine, and the public's addiction is extremely profitable. Personally, I cannot imagine rioting for the right to smoke myself to death. It makes even less sense when you consider that every Carrollist agrees with their government's decision to ban alcohol from being used for anything but medical purposes. They firmly believe alcohol is a foul drug that turns people into idiots and digs them an early grave.
> 
> Ridiculous! **]**

✻✻✻

The laughter and smoke and music in the street turned to silence as the door clicked shut behind him.

"...I'm home."

"Welcome back."

Swift dragged his feet up the stairs and collapsed on the sofa. When his eyes opened again, he saw Hatt lying on his stomach, reading a comic book as the rabbit slowly hopped around him on the bed, as if drawing a circle. He offhandedly thought to himself that despite Hatt's friendliness, he was quite the introvert. It was Ten's day night; every restaurant in town was packed with people, and on the corner of every street there were people lying on the ground in clouds of smoke. And then, there was Hatt, who lay quietly on his bed, and seemed perfectly content with only a rabbit for company, and never asked Swift for anything at all - not even rent.

He unclipped the bowtie of his uniform and dropped it on the coffee table. His gaze flitted up to the window, to the sun as it dipped under the treetops. Tomorrow, he thought, would be his chance to find the time ship. The forest workers would be off on Leven's day, and he could finally look for it without fear of being watched or tailed. Considering how sturdy the ship was, a crash in a forest would leave it with scratches, or maybe a few dents at worst. His challenge was overwhelmingly to locate it.

"Hey, Swift."

"Yeah?"

Hatt flipped a page in his comic book. "Do you think people before were different from people now?"

Swift sat up in surprise. "...Yes."

"Hmmm-"

Hat rolled onto his back, resting the comic book on his chest as he stared up at the ceiling.

> **[** Sometimes, I find myself thinking that Hatt is oddly philosophical in the seemingly simple things that he says. **]**

Swift's stomach was eating itself alive when he came down the stairs and rummaged through the cupboards. Hatt had apparently gone shopping, and had filled the kitchen with all sorts of snacks that had him wiping drool off his chin - dried salmon strips and mango bits, chocolate covered biscuits, saffron pudding, and candied pecans. But in the end, his guilt was greater than his gluttony.

He settled on an apple, and spooned a bit of rice into a bowl.

✻✻✻

That night, he woke up at the sound of a thud. Too drowsy to make any sense of it, he began to fall back asleep when the sound came again. With each thud growing heavier and heavier, he shook the sleep off and sat up to listen. It seemed to be coming from below, or to be exact, from behind the door.

"Hatt," he whispered. A few seconds passed with no reply, and he raised his voice to a murmur. "Hatt!"

There was a stirring on the other side of the loft, before Hatt groaned and sat up. "Hm...?"

"Where's the rabbit?"

"Furry Adonis?" There was a pause as Hatt felt around under his blanket. "He's right here."

There was another pause as Swift tried to come to terms with the rabbit's name. "...Right where?"

"Next to me."

The sound came again, so heavy now that the rails on the loft trembled, and the door seemed to inch out of its frame with every thud. There was no longer any doubt that it was coming from outside. For a few seconds, it seemed to have stopped, before a quiet groan filled the silence and his body went rigid with fear.

"What was that?" Hatt whispered.

"That's what I want to know!"

Hatt was sitting now with his legs folded, hugging the rabbit to his chest. When his voice came again, it came in a terrible stutter.

"Y-you don't think it's..."

Swift held his breath.

"...An e-enormous p-p-puppy?"

The suspense dropped like a weight. His face blanked.

> **[** If you're unfamiliar with the story, allow me to explain that in chapter six of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she finds herself face to face with an enormous puppy, compared to which Alice was perhaps the size of a little mouse. She is understandably very alarmed by this, and fears the puppy may eat her if it happens to be hungry. But she manages to escape by distracting the puppy with a stick. **]**

"An enormous what?" Swift puzzled, too lost in thought to feel fear any longer.

The thud came again, and Hatt brought his knees up to his chest. "...Puppy."

> **[** This enormous puppy has since found its way into every genre of their fiction, and has become the object of every Carrollist's worst fears, though they cannot rationalise, even with their science, why ever there would exist a dog the size of an elephant. Personally, I find it ridiculous to be afraid of such a nonsensical thing when there are so many real dangers to fret about. But they have taken this fairytale device very seriously, and have fallen into a habit of attributing all their fears of the unknown to the work of an enormous baby canine, who is always lurking just around the corner, out of sight, where no one will ever be able to prove or disprove its existence. Instead of attributing strange occurrences to something _believable!_
> 
> Like! 
> 
> A ghost! 
> 
> ...I suppose. **]**

Swift said with all the sincerity in the world, "I don't think it's an enormous puppy, Hatt."

The sound came again, and Hatt shrank back against the wall.

"I sure hope... you're right."

Despite how dark it was in the room, he could already see the sun creeping up over the trees. They were awake for some time, listening to the groaning and thudding behind the door until at last it died down, and came to a complete stop. 

Sighing, Swift sank into the sofa and closed his eyes. A minute later, a nagging suspicion made him sit up again with a huff. As expected, Hatt was still sitting with his back to the wall, cradling his rabbit.

"Hatt."

He startled at his voice. 

"W-what now?"

"Go to sleep."

✻✻✻

"Swift... Swift-"

Daylight streamed in through the open window.

"Swift..."

Something very small and soft brushed his cheek. He opened his eyes to see Hatt crouched by the sofa, poking him with the rabbit's paw.

"It's started," he said.

Swift's voice was more a series of grumbles than words. "...What has? I'm going to sleep-"

"The sunlight fest!"

"I don't see... any pests," he muttered, closing his eyes again.

> **[** The sunlight fest, as they call it, is a summer-welcoming festival. It is celebrated on June 5th - the day marked on the Carrollist calendar as the first day of summer. **]**

"The sunlight fest," Hatt corrected him. "There's all sorts of things to see and play and eat..."

At the mention of _eat_ , Swift sprang up. "All sorts of things? You say?"

"All sorts!"

He rubbed his chin in thought, scrunched his face and hummed to himself, then pressed a finger to the space between his brows, as if he were very troubled. "I suppose I can spare some time today..."

"Oh, it's Leven's day," Hatt assured him. "You've got nothing but time, you know."

Swift's hand fell to his side in defeat. Clearly Hatt was not one to understand pretences.

✻✻✻

The clusters of people pouring out of their homes and into the street all moved in the same direction, and the town seemed more lively now than it had even the night before, despite that every shop and restaurant was shuttered and closed for the day - with the exception of the _Underlands corner shop_. As they neared the bridge, the scent of grilled fish and baked pies rose into the air. Music could be heard in the distance, and the murmur of the crowd turned to laughter and shouting.

The street running through the harbour was lined with colourful stalls on either side, where the owners sold candied fruits and delicacies, charms for luck and gifts to bring home, games for children and adults alike. A chain of wooden rowing boats were tied to the docks, and in the grass field across the bridge, people were putting blankets down and having picnics, or lounging in clouds of their own smoke. Most people were dressed in some shade of blue, and while the women wore bows on their heads, the men wore bows around their neck. But Hatt was dressed in his usual grey overalls, and Swift was dressed in the only clothes he could wear to fit in - his work uniform, minus the bowtie that he'd very purposefully left behind.

As they stepped onto the harbour, Swift's gaze jerked to a stall at the front that sold miniature variations of Bunberryburryborn tarts on sticks.

"I see it!" he shouted.

Hatt scanned the harbour. "See what?"

"The oasis!"

Before he could ask what _oasis_ meant, Swift was already racing to the stall.

"Tart on a stick! Tart on a stick!" the owner called to the festival-goers, waving samples in his hand.

Swift's mouth hung open as he leaned over the front of the stand to get a better look at all the flavours stacked on the shelves. It was only when the owner asked him what he wanted to buy that he remembered he still didn't have any money. Taking a step back, he jogged in place as he waited impatiently for Hatt to catch up.

"Hey! String! If you like those, try a Bunberryburryborn cookie!"

He looked back at the man who was shouting to him from another stall, and he curiously crossed the harbour to see what he was selling.

"They're Bunberryburryborn flavoured!" he grinned, holding up a sandy, hardened biscuit.

Swift grimaced at the sight of it. "That's quite alright, thank you."

"You sure?"

"Yes," he said, crossing his arms. "Personally, I find it very dishonest to refer to a biscuit as a cookie when offering it to someone. "

The seller burst into laughter, but Swift wasn't the least bit joking.

✻✻✻

By the time they wandered to the game stalls, Swift had a different snack on a stick between all his fingers, and was alternating between taking bites out of every snack that didn't belong to Hatt. He only looked up from his feast when he heard music rising above the crowd. 

At the end of the harbour there was a small stage. He saw a group of people dressed in fur, tails, ears, and wings, and one person was dressed in a blue frock. They were doing an odd dance that looked like a chase, and on the side of the stage, a woman was playing the shamisen. As the tune played faster, the chase intensified.

"What are they doing over there?" Swift asked.

Hatt followed his stare. "That there? That's the caucus race."

Swift nodded to himself.

_Figures..._

As he searched for a place to sit down and thoroughly stuff his face, Hatt started bouncing up and down.

"Oh! I love this game!"

He darted to a stall with a dark green tarp, where he dug through his pockets and handed the owner one-tenth of a flat. Careful not to drop the snacks, Swift trailed after him and peered into the stall. 

It looked to be some kind of hammer-throwing game. The targets were carved out of wood and lined up in rows by weight, with the lightest targets at the front and the heaviest targets in the back. Each target leaned on a metal spring with a bell, and the aim was to bend it back far enough to make the bell ring. The best prizes were awarded for bending the sturdiest targets in the back row, that were harder to hit and harder to move.

"It's heavy," the owner warned, sliding him the hammer. "Be careful, now."

Hatt gave a nod and lifted the hammer. "Thanks."

He took a step back, pausing to aim as the owner moved out of the way.

_That's some frightening focus..._ Swift thought. _Is he going to hit the target or assassinate it?_

He threw the hammer with a flick of his wrist, and a bell chimed in celebration as a target in the last row bent back on its spring. Giving himself a pat on the head, he spread his hands on the stand and leaned forward, now giving serious consideration to which fluffy prize he wanted to take home.

The owner stepped out and took the hammer back. "Good arm! You can choose from the top shelf if you like." 

The top shelf housed the largest plush pillows. So large, in fact, that Swift worried it would become a bother to walk around the festival with it.

"Top shelf..." Hatt mused, suddenly bouncing on his heels again. "That one!" he said, pointing to a plush in the corner. "The slice of bread with a face!"

_That one looks delicious,_ Swift thought, lamenting what a shame it was that he couldn't eat it. As the owner handed the prize to Hatt, Swift curiously stepped forward.

"Can I try?"

Hatt was beaming as he squeezed the bread pillow in his arms. "Yeah! It's good fun!"

The owner swung the hammer around, looking Swift up and down. "What are you going to throw the hammer with?"

"My arm, of course." Swift said.

"I don't see one," he snickered.

"Now don't you be mean to Swift," Hatt warned. "He cries easy, alright?"

Swift's jaw dropped. _Lies and slander!_ he wanted to say. He couldn't believe what he was hearing... he was so offended he could cry.

"Hatt..." he muttered, holding out his fistfuls of snacks. "Hold the goods."

"Oh-"

Hatt carefully lifted the sticks from between his fingers, one by one, and arranged them again in his own hands. Cradling his hurt pride, Swift thrust his hand over the stand. "The hammer, if you please."

With a bit of reluctance, the owner lowered it into his hand and took several cautious steps back. "Don't drop it now, you hear?"

Though he'd sooner die than admit it, it did, in fact, take most of his strength not to drop it in surprise when the weight fell into his hand. Gripping the handle with both hands, he took a step back, followed by another, and another, until he was so far from the stall that he'd backed into the one across from it. Raising the hammer like it were a baseball bat, he waited for a path to clear between the festival-goers.

"Hey!" the owner shouted. "You can't-!"

Before he could protest any further, Swift had swung the hammer and let it fly. It spun through the air like a propeller and hit a target in the back row, breaking it clean in half. The owner watched in horror as the broken half dangled from the side of the target, and fell to the ground with a sad clatter. On the other hand, Hatt looked very impressed.

"That was incredible, Swift!"

Truthfully, Swift was as horrified as the stall's owner. He hadn't meant to break it, but to apologise now would be the worst thing. It was better to pretend it had been his intention all along. Clearing his throat, he strutted back to the stall with an air of renewed confidence, and skimmed the prizes on the top shelf.

"I'll take the cucumber marmalade," he said. "To match the bread."

✻✻✻

As they crossed the bridge, the two of them stared at the tiny marmalade keychain in Swift's hand.

"He seemed angry," Swift said on reflection, looking up at Hatt.

Hatt nodded vigorously. "Seemed angry he did."

They weaved through clusters of people and clouds of smoke in search of a place to sit in the grass, and finally settled in the shade of the storybook house. As the day grew long, the crowd had gradually shuffled out of the harbour and collected in the field.

Hatt was rummaging through the bag of snacks they'd picked up from various stalls. His face lit up when he finally found the seven-coloured tea cookie, and clamped it between his teeth as he sat back in the grass.

"What are those there?" Swift asked, peering at the boats tied to the dock.

Hatt glanced over his shoulder with the cookie still in his mouth. "The boats?"

"Yeah."

"Well, they're boats."

Swift sighed loudly. "What are the boats _doing_ there?"

Taking a bite out of his cookie, Hatt sat forward. "That's where they shoot off the fireworks, I think."

_Oh. So that's what they are._

As much as he would have liked to see fireworks, he couldn't spare any more time for the festival. The longer he waited, the dimmer the sky would get, and the harder it would be to search for the ship. However bright it may have been in the town, light didn't reach the ground so easily under thickets of trees. Digging through the bag of snacks, he pulled out the last Bunberryburryborn on a stick and ate it in a single bite. Hatt watched him curiously as he stood up and brushed the grass off his clothes.

"Um, I forgot, I have an errand to run," Swift muttered.

"Now?"

"Yeah. I... promised Mary-Ann..." he paused, wracking his brain for a last half to the sentence. "...I'd read Shakespeare to her cats."

_Awful,_ he thought. _I should have left it half-finished..._

"Do her cats like Shakespeare?" Hatt puzzled.

Growing more restless with every second in passing, Swift started through the grass, calling over his shoulder as he broke into a run, "More than they like Oscar Wilde!"

Hatt hunched over and bit into his cookie, contemplating this.

✻✻✻

The music and the voices faded into the distance as he flew down the main street, where the only sound in the silence was the tap of his shoes on the cobblestone. The town was as still as a photograph, barring the lone woman in powder blue who came down the steps of her apartment and scurried in the direction of the bridge. 

He was short of breath when at last he reached the door of Hatt's apartment and fumbled for the key in his pocket. A welcome breeze blew in through the open door as he came inside, and fell to his knees at the bookcase housing the old trinkets.

_Please work,_ he pleaded, laying the old compass flat in his palm.

Keeping his eye on the needle, he stood up and wandered around the apartment. Though it wavered a little when he held it over the stove, it seemed to point consistently in the same direction. Pocketing the compass, he locked the door behind himself and started up the trail.

The clearing, to his relief, showed no tracks from the crash. He spun around himself a few times as he looked for the tree he'd fallen from, and spotted his parachute still fluttering in its branches. A cluster of birds had made a home of it.

_How am I supposed to climb this..._ he brooded.

The pine trees, as tall as they were, had no branches close to the ground, and even the branches halfway up their trunks were thin and oddly spaced. He stared up the tree for some time, before he sighed in defeat and sat down to rethink his options. If he had a rope to throw up to the branches, or a ladder that could help him find his footing, he might make it to the top of a tree tall enough to scan the forest from. But he had neither of those on hand, and no idea where to find them on such short notice. Taking the compass out from his pocket, he cupped it in his hand and brushed the dust off the glass. The wood around its frame was nicked and worn, and he offhandedly wondered how old such a fragile thing was, how long it had been sitting on Hatt's shelf, and why he had kept it. He tipped his head back and stared up at the sky in thought. There must have been a way, some way to find a thing as large and unusual as the time ship in a forest of trees and stone and weeds.

_...Oh._

He looked down at the old thing in his hand.

It occurred to him that maybe the compass was all he needed. Considering the ship itself was a magnet powerful enough to accidentally ground a satellite, if he could just get close enough to it, the needle was bound to lean in its direction. 

He stood up and scanned the clearing again. Somewhere in the forest, the ship had crashed within a given radius of his fall. If he moved in a spiral using the tree he fell into as his centre, then at some point in his path he would step into its magnetic field. He knelt down to tighten the laces on his shoes and roll up the cuffs of his leprechaun slacks, then darted away from the clearing in a straight line. When the tree was out of sight, he paused to look down the compass needle, before he started moving in a spiral.

✻✻✻

It was his third trip around when the needle abruptly swung the other way, and he staggered to a full stop. The needle settled into its new direction, and he spun around to get a better look at his surroundings. There were shrubs and logs and tall grass scattered around the trees, but that was about all he could see. Keeping his eye on the needle, he slowly retraced his steps, stopping again when it suddenly swung around itself. 

_Here...?_

His brows knitted together when he looked down, to find that he was standing on a rock buried in the ground. Too anxious to feel even disappointment, he kicked away and sprinted through the trees again. 

Doubt was already on his heels - thoughts of how little he could do on his own, and how much easier it would have been if he'd asked others for help. But to go against the orders of the people who had put their trust in him was something he could never live down. He would rather die here a failure than go home a traitor.

✻✻✻

Days in North Wonderland seemed to stretch on without end. The sun hung overhead like it was suspended from a string, and he never once saw it set, or saw it rise. He knew that supposedly the dusk came at midnight, and the dawn trailed after it at one. But if someone asked him to swear on it - to swear that the night would eventually come - he would have hesitated to make that promise, to say that he was certain of something he had never seen, or felt. But as he sat leaning against the trunk of an old tree, he began to sense for the first time how the sun in the Wonderland sky moved. From where it had filtered down through the treetops before, it glinted in his eyes now from between their branches. The colour of the grass was muted, and as he waited for a breath of air that didn't sear his chest, time was becoming tangible - and he could feel it slipping away.

Anxiety crept up on him like the dusk, sinking into his head with questions like _what if someone found it already_ , and, _what if someone took it-_

He pushed back with the insistence that only an _idiot_ would come this deep into the forest where there was no trail, and no sound, and soon, not even light.

Staggering onto his feet, he looked down at the compass in his hand. All he needed was to see the needle. As long as there was light enough to see it move, he would keep searching.

✻✻✻

The sun was sinking into the horizon, and the east half of the spiral was leading him up a hill that only grew steeper every time. It was there, on the sharp curve of the hill, that his run nearly slowed to a stop. He realised now the needle that had been moving clockwise around the spiral was slowly moving counter clockwise with every step he took across the hill. He lifted his head and scanned the patch for rocks. But instead, he saw a broken tree. _Broken,_ not uprooted. Broken down the middle and fallen, with the jagged stub of its trunk still pointed to the sky. Behind it was another tree just like it, broken and fallen, without a prick of moss yet to grow over it. The needle on the compass pulled him up the hill, as he stepped over and ducked under one broken tree after another.

When he emerged from the thicket, the needle was unwavering, pointing him in a straight line. Above the summit of the hill, he could see a glimpse of the open sky - of the red and the pink that bled into the horizon like watercolours - and he suddenly broke into a run. There wasn't a doubt in his mind now. The time ship was over that hill. With all the strength left in his legs, he climbed up the last stretch, and looked down from the summit.

The bang of a firework erupted behind him as he fell onto his knees.

It was right there. He could see it now, where the grass dipped into the underside of the cliff. His eyes shifted to the dark shape in the water, that looked just like a sunken ship with wings. Waves rolled over the shadow, crashing on the rocks under the cliff.

_No_

The compass fell and rolled to his feet. Fireworks thundered in the distance as he dug his hands into the grass. 

"No,"

His breath escaped him. Memories struck him like flashes of lightning. The memory of his mother, who smiled through her tears when she waved to him from the doorway. The memory of his terrier, who trailed after him all the way to the car. The memory of his friends, who he'd buried with his own hands in valleys of rubble and black water. The memory of his sister, who he'd refused to speak to before he left. He couldn't remember what his reason had been, all he knew was that it was _stupid... stupid... something stupid._ Something that he could never apologise for. His sight went from bleary to snow white. She, he, she, they... everyone, _everyone_ he knew was dead, buried, turned to earth, bones and all. They were things of the distant past now, and he was all that remained. The parts of them that had become a part of him were all that remained, and all he had left. 

Now the sound of these waves was the closest thing knew to home. It was the same sea that his mother and his sister had looked at, the sea that never changed, however many years passed.

Tears fell as he sank to the ground. His mouth hung open, and his thoughts were chaos, but his cries would only come as silence. 

✻✻✻

The rabbit gently hopped around the bread plush on the bed, doing its usual laps. On the other side of the loft, a seat cushion was upturned, and the pages of Swift's journal were neatly folded where he'd left them. Only the last page was missing as Hatt sat on the edge of the coffee table, reading through Swift's latest narrative, and smiling to himself every so often.

At the sound of footsteps on the cobblestone, he slowly sat up. He folded the last page into the others, and left them as they were under the cushion. Then, lifting the comic book off the floor, he shuffled to the bed and rolled onto his stomach, paging through the book until he found where he'd left off the last time.

As quietly as the door opened, it shut.

The apartment was silent for a few minutes. It didn't sound like anyone had come home at all, but Hatt carried on reading his comic book, and paid it little mind. 

When at last there was sound, it was the slow drum of Swift's feet on on the stairs. He paused on the top step, casting a glance at Hatt, before he padded across the loft to the sofa. He pulled his knees to his chest as he sat down, and wrapped the blanket around himself. When Hatt looked over, he was staring at the floor, with eyes so red that it seemed painful. And it must have been, he thought, because he didn't seem to show any interest in the bag of snacks on the coffee table, either.

Hatt sat up. He took a breath at first - to say something. But on second thought, he thought it better not to say anything at all. Swift seemed to sink deeper into himself with every second in passing, so much that Hatt wondered if he would slip between the sofa cushions and disappear forever.

He lifted the rabbit off the bed and lowered it onto the floor, giving it a nudge in the other direction.

It hopped cautiously across the loft, resting its paws on the sofa as it reached up to sniff the corner of Swift's blanket. Too deep in thought, Swift didn't notice until he heard the scratch of a paw on the fabric. He looked down, and their eyes met for a moment, before he lifted the rabbit into his lap and bunched the blanket around them both.

Half-smiling to himself, Hatt turned back to his comic book.


	6. Every thing's got a moral, if only you can find it.

He startled awake from a smack on the cheek.

"Oh, my dear paws! Have some shame! The young folk these days..." 

Cupping his cheek, he watched the old woman march away with her cat on her head. 

_I need a new place to nap..._ he thought.

Figuring his break must be over, he stood up and brushed away the dried leaves that had fallen in his lap. But he was still a little bit asleep as he tottered into the bakery and hung his coat in the backroom.

He lurched forward when the boss welcomed him from his break with a hearty slap on the back.

"Look alive, Swift!"

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he tried to move his feet a little faster.

✻✻✻

"Order for table four, table one," Mary-Ann called.

He hurried to the counter and carried the sandwich plates to their tables, then bustled from table five to nine to three, collecting the empty plates left by the afternoon's last round of sandwich munchers. As he crossed the room to the sink, he suddenly felt a tug on his pant leg, and looked back.

"Ah! It's Swift sir! I knew it!"

Dinah was standing at his heels in her new school dress, twinkling up at him with a toothy smile - only, one of her teeth was missing now.

"Hey, you know," she said, giving a tug to bid him to listen.

Every instinct he had told him _not_ to listen. And yet, despite how afraid he was of what she might say, he found himself resting the plates on his knee as he crouched down. 

"I ate an apple seed today," she announced. "I wonder if I'll grow into a great, big apple tree some day."

Swift was about to reply when she was suddenly swept off the floor and lifted into the air. He looked up to see her mother holding her out like she was wet laundry.

"It'll be an accomplishment if you grow into a young woman some day," she sighed.

Dinah burst into a fit of giggles, apparently finding this idea very funny. Her mother cradled her and bowed to Swift in apology. "I'm sorry about that."

Swift stood up and shook his head. "No, it's fine."

She held on to Dinah with one arm as he reached down with the other to pick up her pastry bag.

"Did you buy the moon cookies?" Dinah asked.

"I didn't," she replied. "We wouldn't want you growing up to be the half moon now."

Dinah gave a pout and slumped onto her mother's shoulder. As they stepped outside, Swift heard her say, "I should like to be the half moon. It's much prettier than the full moon."

He laughed under his breath, and looked over to see that Dinah was waving to him from behind the glass. Setting the plates down in the sink, he blinked at her in surprise. Then, without thinking, he raised his hand and waved back.

✻✻✻

He came home to find there were boxes stacked against the front wall of the building, and the door of the apartment above them was being held open by a brick. From where he stood outside, he could hear the scratch of furniture being dragged across the floor. The neighbour stepped out and carefully came down the stairs, carrying the unassembled frame of a bed. Swift gave an awkward nod as their eyes met. It was his first time seeing the person who lived above them, and apparently it would also be his last.

He went inside and hastily shut the door to keep the cold out. It didn't sound like Hatt was home yet. Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out the envelope with his September pay and separated 40 flats, then slid the rest back into the envelope. As he came over to the counter, his eyes shifted to the pile of flats he'd left in June, and July... and August. He slapped another 40 flats onto the pile, and tore a scrap of paper from stack in the bookcase.

_Take it this time,_ he scribbled, and set the note down by the pile. Huffing to himself, he came up the stairs and collected his scarf and his gloves from the shelf under the coffee table. He glanced at the water bowl on the floor. Just to be safe, he filled it in the sink again and left it by Hatt's bed, then locked the door behind himself.

✻✻✻

When stars reflected in the water, the line between the earth and the sky disappeared. Everything above him and below him looked endless, seamless, like he were sitting at the edge of the universe. He pulled his scarf over his mouth, and crossed his arms over his knees as he looked out from the clifftop.

Sometimes he let himself wonder if there was still a way to recover the ship, or if all of this had been a dream. He imagined how his family had lived to the last of their days - hoped that his dog had been buried by the flowerbed in the yard, hoped that his mother never had to feel the pain of losing her daughter the way she lost her son, hoped that everyone was somewhere, now, in the blanket of stars above his head. His gaze sank to the rocks. Rising to his feet, he inched to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sunken shadow in the water. 

There was nothing left; he had done all that he could do. Maybe someone else would carry out the mission in his stead. Maybe it would turn out alright, in the end. Or maybe everything had happened just as it should.

He took a step back from the edge. Resting on his knees, he folded his hands in prayer.

✻✻✻

When he came home, he was more annoyed than ever to find the lights were on, but the money and the note had been left on the counter. Kicking off his shoes, he stomped up the stairs to find Hatt lying on his back, reading one of his botany books. Though he glared at him from the top of the stairs, Hatt didn't seem to notice or care, and carried on reading as he turned the page in his book.

He wasted a minute glaring daggers into Hatt's back, before he threw himself onto the sofa and pulled the covers over his head. A peaceful silence settled over the room, where the only sound was the intermittent turning of a page, or the tap of a paw on the floor. Swift was already drifting to sleep when Hatt finally broke the silence.

"Hey, Swift."

With all the intensity one could put into ignoring someone, he ignored him.

"Swift."

He pulled the cover higher over his head.

"Swift. Swift. Swift. Swift. Swift. Swift-"

"What!" he snapped, tearing the covers away as he sat up.

_As expected,_ he thought. _The silent treatment doesn't work on idiots._

Hatt lowered the book onto his stomach and looked up at the ceiling. "Shouldn't you see the doctor again?"

"What for?"

"I dunno... To make sure your mals are all nourished now, and stuff."

Swift cast a glance to the side, and frowned.

_My "mals" are plenty nourished,_ he thought, hiding himself under the covers again. Sleep overcame him as he listened to pages turn, one after another.

✻✻✻

Swift was having an odd dream. 

He dreamt that he was sitting on the sofa with Hatt, and they were each holding a game controller. On the other side of the loft, there was a television where Hatt's bed should have been, and the popping of machine guns was thundering from the screen.

"Why is this game so violent?" Hatt asked.

Swift was mashing buttons and leaning from side to side when he said, "I don't know. Because it's fun."

"Killing people is fun? I thought it was illegal."

Pausing the game, Swift sighed and lowered his controller. "No, see, if you kill real people, that's illegal and immoral and an infallible sign of mental illness. But if you slaughter countless real-looking people in games, that's perfectly healthy."

Hatt puzzled at this. "Are you sure that either of those statement are true...?"

"Yes. I'm perfectly sure. Never mind that, now." Swift turned off the television and lifted his phone instead. Loading one of his games, he leaned over to show the screen to Hatt. "Here's a game where you gamble away your life's savings to win."

Hatt squinted at the screen. "What do I get for my life's savings?"

"An in-game item that's visually appealing and makes the game negligibly easier to play. Maybe. The chances of getting it are almost zero."

"If I don't win, do I get my life's savings back?"

"No. You've lost them forever."

Hatt's shoulders sank. "Why would I do that?"

"I don't know... because it's..." Swift wavered mid-sentence and lowered his phone, "...fun."

They stared down at the table in thoughtful silence.

Swift turned in his sleep. He dreamt now that he was sitting across from Mary-Ann and Hare at a booth in the bakery. They were leisurely eating their cakes as Swift drew diagrams on a sheet of paper. Capping his pen, he turned the paper upside down so they could see.

"So as I was saying, the government is comprised of the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the executive branch. The legislative branch writes laws, the executive branch approves them, and the judicial branch judges whether they are fair."

Hare crossed his arms over the table and slumped forward, putting his head down.And Mary-Ann looked just as bored biting her spoon as she stared at the paper. Swift pulled the diagrams away and sighed. 

"I feel like you're not listening... Mary-Ann, what are the three powers that control the US government?"

She knitted her brows together in thought. "...Money, anger, and deception."

Swift was about to protest again when he took another look at his diagram and found that she was right. To his surprise, those were, in fact, the three words he'd written down.

"Correct..." he mumbled in his sleep as the dream stage tilted again.

The children from the Caterpillar Nursery were trailing after him like ducklings as he moved down an aisle in the pharmacy. He stopped in his tracks and they all crowded around his feet, watching him take a package from the shelf.

"This is a pill that gets rid of the pain when you're sick or hurt, so you can work," he explained, then lowered it so they could see.

"Why don't I just rest until I'm better?" asked Hatter little.

"You can't do that," he replied. "We live in a society." He returned the package to the shelf and took another. "This is a pill that makes you sleep when you can't sleep at night."

"Why don't I just sleep in the morning when I'm tired, then?" piped Griffon little.

"You can't do that," he said. "We live in a society." He dropped the package like it was litter and the children caught it. They passed it around among each other and took turns awing at all the long words they couldn't read. Swift took another package from the shelf. "This is a pill for when you're too sad to function."

"Why am I so sad?" asked Alice little.

"Because you live in a society that works you like a dog and gives you almost nothing in return while denying your basic needs. Because you live in a society that never hesitates to fault you for the circumstances of your own birth and every subsequent misfortune in your life. Because you live in a society where in theory you are free and equal, but in practice you are locked in a constant struggle for freedom and equality. Because you live in a society that makes you feel like happiness is unattainable."

"If I'm that sad, why should I force myself to function?" she protested.

"Because we live in a society," Swift huffed, annoyed now by how many times he had to repeat himself. He turned the package over and skimmed the back. "This pill is particularly genius because not only does it allow society's wealthy overlords to continue profiting off your labour, but it lets them profit off the sadness they've caused you as well."

Dinah tugged on Swift's sleeve. "Is there a pill that gets rid of society?"

Swift glanced at her, then again at the package. He tore it open and began to pop the pills out of their casing, collecting them in the palm of his hand. "Too much of any pill on this shelf will let you depart from society," he mused, staring at the mountain of capsules in his hand. He flung them behind his back again, and they rattled horribly as they scattered across the aisles.

His breath hitched in his sleep when he found himself dream-walking through a glass door now with Captainice on his heels.

"What is this place..." she muttered.

"It's a popular coffee chain," he explained, leading the way to the counter.

They passed by a table where a group of young girls were drinking oddly-coloured concoctions from plastic cups that were about three feet long.

"That giant cup of pink snow is coffee?" Captainice puzzled.

"No, those are... something else," he said. "A lot of their drinks have sugar, and some don't have any coffee."

"Then it's a candy shop."

"No, it's a coffee shop."

His sister was wearing a wry smile behind the counter. When he walked up to order, she leaned in and asked him, "Who's your date? Was she your teacher or something?"

"She's not my date," he hissed. "Shut up before she hears you."

"Why are you being so shy-"

She pressed her lips together to hide her manic grin when Swift shot her the coldest glare. Keeping his eyes on her, he took a step back to let Captainice order. 

The captain skimmed the menu for a minute before she said, "I want the Cup of Chino."

His sister met her with a friendly smile. "What size?"

"The biggest."

"Sure! Can I have a name for the order?" she asked, uncapping a pen.

"Captainice."

"...Could you spell that for me?"

The captain looked awfully annoyed. "What's to spell? It's Captainice." 

Swift was standing behind the captain when his sister turned to him with a questioning look. He silently shook his head and waved his hands in warning. Her brows knitted together as she turned back to the cup. She stared at it for a moment with the pen hovering above it, before she decidedly scribbled _Becky_.

"Fool..." he mumbled in his sleep. "You're going to get us both killed..."

Before Captainice had a chance to see her drink, he rolled awake. His pillow and his shirt were drenched in cold sweat, and the room spun as he sat up and rested a hand over his pounding heart. He looked at the empty glass on the coffee table. Suddenly, he was hit with a feeling that made him bolt down the stairs and hurl into the kitchen sink.

✻✻✻

He came down the stairwell into the underground street, and crossed the narrow space between two buildings to the door of a bookshop where the sign read: _Mister Dormouse_. A coarse bell chimed as he stepped inside. 

Lanterns hung above the bookshelves where cobwebs stretched like nets. Books were stacked into leaning towers that formed a mighty wall on the counter, and propped up at the end of the counter was a pair of feet in laced grey boots.

He was leaning back in his chair and reading a book of "Very Important Nonsense" when he heard footsteps.

"Swift sir," he said, taking his feet down and sitting forward. "What can I do for you?"

Swift let his backpack slide off his shoulder. It hit the counter with a thud as he gave him an exhausted look, to which Dormouse said, "I know just the thing."

He closed his book and left it on his chair before he went into the back room. Swift could hear the sound of boxes being shuffled and glass falling.

"It better not be what you gave me last time," Swift called from the counter.

"Oh? You didn't like it?"

"It was poison!"

"Well, it was a little strong," he chuckled to himself, carrying out an unmarked bottle. "You have to dilute it, see?"

Swift closed his eyes and shook his head. "No, no, no, you made it all wrong."

"If you say so."

He set the bottle down on the counter and Swift unbuttoned his bag. Then, before he could take it, Dormouse suddenly pulled it away. He disappeared again behind the wall of books as he slumped back into his chair. The rap of his nails on the glass echoed in the silence.

"You owe me this one," Swift grumbled.

"For what?"

"For half-killing me."

"Then I half-owe you at best. And if you round down, I don't owe you nothin. Listen, now. I've just thought of this one. I think it's very good."

Swift breathed a heavy sigh. "Go on then."

There was a pause before he asked, "How is a ticking clock like a bad dream?"

Swift went quiet. He stared at the counter in thought as the clock on the wall ticked away.

"Given up?"

"No." A minute passed, then two minutes, then three. After considering every possible answer, he finally said, "They keep you up at night."

There was a loud clatter as Dormouse brought his feet down and sat up in the samefrantic motion. He leaned forward and glared at Swift from behind the wall of books. With a self-satisfied grin, Swift held out his hand. Dormouse was hesitant at first, eyeing his palm with suspicion like it was a trap. Grudgingly, he smacked the bottle into his hand.

Swift tucked it by his journal and slung the bag over his shoulder. As he headed for door, Dormouse put his feet up on the counter again and leaned back in his chair. "Send my regards to the good folk up there," he called after him.

Swift looked over his shoulder. "The good folk don't want em..."

The bell chimed as the door clicked shut.

✻✻✻

The nurse left the papers on the desk, and gave a smile as he stepped into the hall.

"The doctor will be in shortly."

Swift was left alone in wait. He sat down in the patient's chair and looked around the room, fixating on a poster pinned to the wall.

"Safe and unsafe napping," he read aloud. Curiously, he crossed the room to get a better look at the odd diagrams inked onto the poster. He squinted at the footnote that read: Napping in tightly constricted spaces, while exhilarating, can pose a serious threat to health and safety.

_What kind of fool would deliberately sleep in a tightly constricted space,_ he thought. _It's not exhilarating at all, it's painful and terrifying... Just nap on a bed, heathens..._

In the midst of his thought, the door opened.

"Swift sir."

He turned around to see the doctor pulling out the chair from his desk. They exchanged bows, and Swift took his seat in the patient's chair again.

"Let's see here..." the doctor hummed to himself. He slid his glasses on and skimmed the papers. "Ah! Good news! Your blood test results show no signs of malnourishment." He took a pen from the jar on his desk and jotted some notes on the page. When he set the pen down, he looked up with a smile. "How are you feeling?"

Swift stared back at him in dumb silence. He opened his mouth to say something, then paused again. When at last he spoke, he said, "Tired."

He furrowed his brow. "Tired, you say... How is your head feeling?"

"Heavy," Swift answered, without overthinking it.

The doctor sat back in his chair and folded his hands in thought. "Are you sleeping enough?"

"I'm asleep more than I'm awake."

His brows lifted in surprise, and he gave a slow nod. "Do you wake up feeling well rested?"

"Not at all."

He sat forward in his chair again and made another note at the bottom of the page. He took a quick glance at the page underneath, before he turned to Swift.

"Well, Swift sir, I can prescribe you a pill."

Swift blinked at him in surprise.

"But perhaps, it might suit your needs better to speak with someone. Have you considered therapy?"

"Therapy...?" he echoed.

"Yes. It can work very well for some people."

He imagined for a moment what it might be like to have a conversation with a Carrollist therapist. When he cut out of his thoughts, he said decisively, "I don't think that would help."

The doctor gave a nod. "Then perhaps, speaking with someone who you feel can understand you. A close friend? A partner? A family member?"

Swift stared down at his lap. He was almost certain he had none of these.

✻✻✻

By the time he left the hospital, the sun had dipped under the rooftops. He dragged his feet as he thought about what the doctor had said.

_Someone who can understand?_

He was convinced there wasn't a Carrollist in the world who could understand him. His faith was _an amusing folly_ to them, his thoughts and his opinions were offensive to them, and everything that had ever mattered to him was just another page in a history book to them. If there was anyone who could even begin to understand him, it was someone who was markedly different from them, someone who was not a Carrollist at all - an uncarrollist.

He stopped in the middle of the street and looked up at the dimming sky.

_An uncarrollist..._

His thoughts went back to the nerd who frequented the bakery. The nerd, who always carried books under his arm, books full of ideas or feelings or events from distant times and distant places. His shoes kicked up dust as he darted in the other direction and turned the corner. He couldn't for the life of him remember a single word or number in his address, but his feet hadn't forgotten the path that led him there. 

As he navigated through the maze of streets, the liveliness in the town turned to stillness and silence. He wandered down a small street where there were no shops or businesses, only stretches of tall residential buildings, only strips of frosted grass and orange trees. There, he spotted the building with a tailcoat-wearing rabbit engraved in the side, and a bit further down, the building that was labelled 935. 

_That's the one._

As he stepped into the entrance hall, his eyes shifted to the spiralled staircase. It was not _quite_ as horrific in person as it was in his nightmares. Still, he looked up the stairs with the solemness of one who was mentally preparing himself to climb a mountain. Grabbing onto the rail, he started up the steps.

When he reached the fifth floor, he paused to rest his legs. A tenant stepped out of her apartment with a dog, and she stared for a moment at his unfamiliar face. He gave an awkward nod as she passed him on the stairs, then dragged himself onto his feet and started up the next flight. More than anything, he wondered to himself how such a perfect nerd could trek up and down these stairs every day.

_He must be quite the formidable nerd,_ he thought. _I should like to duel him, but at something I'm good at, like eating, or owning shirts._

When at last he reached the seventh floor, he sat down on the top step to catch his breath. His gaze wandered to the door in the corner.

_Will he even let me in this time?_

Hauling himself onto his feet, he walked up to the door, and took a moment before he knocked to read the sticker on the nameplate.

**Dodo**

He laughed through his nose.

_What a ridiculous name._

He gave a knock and took a step back. It was quiet inside. He knocked again, a little louder this time. It occurred to him that he might not be home yet, or might be too much of a hermit to open at all. In which case, he would just have to wait until he visited the bakery again. He cut out of his thoughts when a shuffling came from inside. A minute later, the door opened just a crack.

"...Can I help you?"

Swift wedged his foot in the sliver of a gap between the door and the frame, hearing a shriek of surprise as he forcefully pushed it open enough for their eyes to lock. "Dodo sir," he said very gravely. "Have you been to tea this month?"

"Quit...! Quit pestering me!" he stammered. "I've told your lot several times before! I'm not going to tea!"

Try as he did to shut the door on him, Swift's foot did not budge. He pushed back against the push-back, and pried the door open even further as he raised his head with a smile. "That makes two of us."

The door suddenly swung open as Dodo let go and stepped back, staring at him with wide eyes. "Oh... You're the foreigner from the bakery," he realised, nudging his glasses up his nose. "What did you come here for?"

Swift stood upright, and spoke with conviction when he said, "I want to hear your thoughts on Wonderland society."

Dodo studied him for a moment, looked him up and down. "...Swift, was it?"

"Yes."

Dodo cast a glance to the side in thought, before he moved away to let him in. "What a ridiculous name," he muttered to himself as he crossed the room. Swift's jaw nearly dropped all seven floors.

The apartment was a dark space even smaller than Hatt's, with the absence of a loft. One wall had the kitchen and the counter built into it, and the two doors that led into the bedrooms. Every other conceivable strip of wall was hidden behind bookcases that reached up to the ceiling. Even the window was covered, and only a faint glow of daylight crept in from between the books. At the centre of the room was a low coffee table, littered with open books and loose papers, and pillows were scattered on the floor around it. When he drew his attention away from the room, he realised that Dodo had been observing him. Swift noticed now, how his hair was mussed and his eyes were tired.

"Sorry, were you napping?"

Dodo blushed furiously.

"I certainly was not!"

✻✻✻

Swift was sitting on a pillow and leaning over the table as he skimmed the titles of the books packed into the shelves. There were books on every period in history, from the beginnings of the universe to the present. There were books on every religion he'd ever heard of - ancient religions, dying religions, modern religions. There were books on countless sciences, and _scientists_ , and books on languages that no one spoke anymore. There were shelves upon shelves dedicated to mathematics, and large collections of old literature and poetry. There were books dedicated to mediocre summaries of fictional works from every era, including Swift's own era. And he realised that he was in fact the living embodiment of these now outdated and difficult-to-comprehend things.

"I only have black tea," Dodo said.

"...That's fine."

Swift looked over his shoulder, watching as he reached into the cupboard for a pair of cups. But what caught his eye among the snacks and stoneware tea sets was the hookah in the corner of the cupboard. He knelt at the end of the table to lay out the cups and the teapot, before he sat himself on a pillow across from Swift. The ticking of the clock filled the silence as Dodo closed all the open books and moved them off the table onto the floor. Swift suddenly put his hand down on a book he was moving. The white lettering on the spine read: _The Common Principles of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam._

Dodo paused and looked up. "What is it?"

"Can I see this?" Swift asked.

He pushed the book across the table to him. "Help yourself."

It was quiet again as he leafed through the book, glancing over the chapter titles, and the summaries beneath them. Dodo cleared the last of the books off the table, and poured them each a cup of tea.

"What do you think of this book?" Swift asked, skimming the chapter that outlined various forms of bigotry that arose from the strict regulation of sex.

Dodo took a sip of his tea and lowered his cup. "I think it's good summary of what old religions were like."

"What were they like?"

"Restrictive."

He wasn't _wrong_ , Swift thought. Sighing, he closed the book and set it down by his pillow.

"Do you think Jesus Christ lived?"

Dodo knitted his brows together. "I suppose, he might have."

"What about Lewis Carroll?"

"He definitely lived."

Swift rested his chin in his hand. "Do you think he was a seer? Who knew the truth about the world?"

"No, that's ridiculous. He was an animal like everyone else."

"What about his book? What is it to you?"

"A fairytale."

Swift paused, then asked with a slight of hesitation. "What about the bible?"

"The bible?" he repeated, pinching his glasses in thought. "It's a violent fairytale, but a fairytale nonetheless"

Swift spread his hands on the floor and leaned back, tipping his head to the ceiling with a long sigh. "...Does it bother you at all?"

"Does what?"

"Carrollism," he said, sitting forward.

"Of course it bothers me."

"Why?"

"It bothers me that Carrollists have deluded themselves into thinking that Lewis Carroll was an all-knowing being, and the sea is a pool of Alice's tears, and when you enter your eternal sleep, you'll float down a rabbit hole to the centre of the earth and arrive at the true Wonderland. Nothing about it makes sense. And yet, they not only believe these ridiculous things, but they have the audacity to call anyone who doesn't _misled_ and _immoral_. It's infuriating."

Swift traced his finger over the rim of his cup. "Eternal sleep..." His gaze flickered up. "Do you mean death?"

Dodo sat back with a frown. "Well, yes. If you want to be crass about it."

_Since when is death a crass word,_ he wondered. Now that he gave it some proper thought, he realised he'd never heard a Carrollist say the word _die_.

"What about opium?"

"...What about it?" Dodo puzzled.

"You don't see a problem with it?"

"I don't."

"Oh... Then, what about alcohol?"

"Alcohol? That's a foul drug."

Swift looked down at his cup. "...What if I said I like to drink it?"

This last question seemed to make Dodo very uncomfortable. There was a long silence before he said, "That would make you a foul person."

Swift would have been lying to himself if he said it didn't hurt a little to hear that. And the conviction he'd said it with made it all the worse. "Is it really so bad?"

"It's unethical and dangerous!" he snapped, sounding quite offended now. "Opium is not comparable to alcohol, if that is the insinuation that you're making."

If working at the bakery had taught him one new skill, it was how to apologise when he didn't feel the least bit apologetic. "...Sorry," he said with a half bow. "I assure you, I didn't mean to offend."

The room was silent again. Swift stared at his lap, burying himself deeper in his thoughts as Dodo poured himself another cup of tea.

"Do you really..."

Swift looked up.

"Do you really... drink alcohol?" Dodo asked in an almost whisper, with a horrified sort of curiosity.

His first instinct was to lie. And to be fair, it was his instinct to lie about almost everything. But he also desperately wanted to see if Dodo's opinion on the matter would change... if he were completely honest with him.

"...Yes," he said at a length. "I drink it all the time."

The pauses between Dodo's questions grew longer as he reeled from the shock.

"Have you ever thought about getting help?"

"No. Never. I have literally never thought about it."

Dodo covered his mouth in horror. He made a very troubled face as he looked down at his tea, and Swift couldn't tell at this point if he was troubled by fear or by pity. Daylight had faded from the cracks. Save the dim lights strung from the tops of the bookshelves, it was dark, and now, awfully quiet. 

"I think you should seek help," he said decidedly. "For your own good."

Dodo set his glasses down on the table and lifted his cup. Swift watched him drink his tea and wondered if there was anything he could say that Dodo wouldn't be offended by. He wondered if there was anything that Dodo could understand about him that a Carrollist couldn't.

"...Do you like the colour red?" he ventured.

"Red? Well... I like it on women."

_I like it on myself..._ Swift thought, but he couldn't see what good would come from saying it. He began to wonder what he was expecting when he came here. Still, he tried to think of something common that Carrollists had normalised, and that an uncarrollist like Dodo should rightfully find strange.

"Do you believe in enormous puppies?" he asked finally.

Dodo went rigid at his question. His fingers did not even uncurl from around the handle of his cup. "Enormous puppies? Why do you ask?"

Swift looked at him for a moment, then shook his head. "Don't worry about it. It's nothing important."

Dodo cleared his throat and nudged his glasses up. "Well, it's not exactly something you can prove or disprove, is it? Though I find it very hard to believe, I cannot definitively say that I don't believe."

"So, you believe?"

"Well, I mean... I don't _know_."

Swift sat back. "Oh..."

"Sometimes," Dodo began, sounding very defensive now. "Sometimes, there are strange occurrences that are hard to explain with reason."

"You reckon they're the work of an enormous puppy-"

"I don't _reckon_ ," he snapped. "I'd _like_ to believe there's a reasonable explanation, but sometimes, there just _isn't_ one."

Unable to contain himself any longer, Swift hunched over with laughter, pressing his arm over his mouth in an attempt to stifle it.

"What?" Dodo pouted, looking as angry as he did embarrassed. "Are you laughing at me?"

"No, I'm sorry..." Swift breathed, trying to collect himself as he sat back up. "It's just, you seem like quite the Carrollist to me."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I mean, you don't seem all that different from them... You share more common beliefs with the Carrollists than you do with me."

"Perhaps that is because you are raving mad, sir!" he huffed. "Never in my life has a stranger entered my home and asked me if I was napping!"

"Is that too uncarrollist...?"

"It's not uncarrollist! It's just indecent!"

Dodo was practically seething. Swift thought of every sad thing he knew to try and wipe the lingering smile off his face. "Do you think it's normal to nap six times in a day?" he asked.

Dodo's ears turned red again as he looked down at the table, then to the side, then back at the table. "It's just! Human nature..."

_Human nature?_

The urge to laugh vanished entirely. He looked down at his lap in thought. Suddenly he felt very stupid, for thinking that even an uncarrollist could understand him.

"I see... So, the extent of your uncarrollism is that you believe Lewis Carroll was simply an author, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was simply a work of fiction... I suppose," Swift said, after some consideration. "That makes you _less_ of a Carrollist, then. An unconscious half-carrollist."

Dodo's hands were curled tightly at the edge of the table when he said, "I am certainly _not_ a Carrollist! Kindly refrain from referring to me as such! I abhor their beliefs, and I-"

"I don't think you realise how ingrained it is in everything you say, and everything you do," Swift cut in. "Believing that his book was a work of fiction has not freed you from its influence. You maintain Carrollist beliefs, but you call them ethics and decency and human nature. I suppose it's difficult to notice this in yourself because these aspects of Carrollism are so deeply ingrained in your culture, and they're all you've ever known. To become aware of them, to consider them, and to possibly reject them... wouldn't just make you an uncarrollist. It would make you antisocial. It would make you stand out like red paint on a white rose tree."

Dodo's tense shoulders sank at the sound of his own words coming back to him. 

"Even uncarrollists would be as unwilling to listen to you as you are to me... because talking to me threatens your sense of normalcy. You call me raving mad, out of fear that something I say might make sense to you, that it might tug on a single thread of your moral fibre and begin to unravel it. You would rather judge me than understand me, because understanding me runs the risk of becoming like me. And it's not your fault... anyone who values their sense of belonging would do the same. What good would it do to be as miserable as I am? To be demonised, to never be understood. But..." Swift paused, casting a glance at the book on the floor beside him. "I'm no better than you. I was never better. Just... different."

He stared dumbly at Swift, and for a second, opened his mouth to speak, only to purse his lips and look away. He looked back when Swift rose to his feet, like he had something he wanted to say but he'd lost his voice.

"I sincerely apologise for disturbing you on Leven's day," Swift said with a bow. "...Thank you for the tea."

He shut the door behind himself, and stared down at his feet.

_I said too much._

✻✻✻

He staggered over the threshold as the boss gave him a slap on the back.

"Look alive, Swift! The day's not over yet!"

He stood himself upright and left through the backdoor, dragging along garbage bags full of stale pastries. The cold air pricked his skin as he came around to the dumpster. And there, he saw a black cat with a white spot peering at him from the other side. Their eyes locked for a moment, before he knelt down and untied one of the bags. He rummaged through it for a Bunberryburryborn tart, then held it out in his palm.

"Do you want this?"

The cat slowly stepped out from behind the dumpster, flicking its tail as it curiously eyed his hand. He watched as it came forward to sniff the tart, only to turn its head to the side in disgust. Swift was dumb with shock as he dropped the tart, and looked through the bag for something it might like. He pulled out a plain, white bread roll, and held it out for the cat to sniff. The way it sauntered up again with such casual disinterest, it almost seemed like this cat was _gracing_ him with a chance to redeem himself. Swift pursed his lips in anticipation as it brought its nose to his hand. Suddenly the cat began to paw at the bread until he dropped it.

"As expected..." he muttered, shaking his head as he watched it nibble on the bread. "A cat cannot appreciate the genius of a Bunberryburryborn tart."

The cat looked up from its lunch and mewled at him, to which Swift shrugged and said, "Come and see me in my office if you change your mind." He held out another bread roll. "Here's my business card."

The cat promptly nicked it from his hand and rolled it next to the other one. He was crouched on the ground and watching it eat bread for some time, before he stood up and threw the bags into the dumpster.

✻✻✻

When he came home, there was a mess of empty boxes by the upstairs neighbour's door.

_Someone moved in,_ he thought. _That was fast..._

His cold hands fumbled with the keys a bit before he unlocked the door, and stepped inside.

"I'm back," he called.

It was quiet as he shut the door. He came around to the foot of the stairs and looked up to the loft. Hatt wasn't home yet. As he opened the snack cupboard in the kitchen, he offhandedly wondered to himself how the forest workers could use their hands at all in this cold. His were so numb he could barely grip the keys. In the midst of his thoughts, there came an awful racket from the upstairs neighbour, like something very heavy was being dragged across the floor. But the sound that followed was something very soft - the tone of a piano key.

He paused, with his hand still resting on the cupboard shelf as he listened. The same string of notes came a few times, like the keys were being tested, before another note broke the loop. The cheerful tune played for a minute, then faded into silence. He rested his hand on the counter, forgetting now what it was that he wanted to eat. Another string of notes suddenly broke the silence. It was a quieter tune than the last - something sad, something familiar, that seemed to open a hole in his chest. He stood rooted to the floor and stared at the counter.

_I know this piece..._

Every thought in his head was slowly drowned out by the hum of the keys. He looked up to the ceiling.

_Beethoven's... Moonlight Sonata._

> **[** Hatt once asked me, "Do you think people before were any different from people now?" It struck me because he used the word _people_ , and I reflexively answered, _yes_. When I ask myself the same question now, I begin to doubt my answer. **]**

As the music sank through the floor, the notes seemed to float down like snow. He reached his hand up to the ceiling, pretending for a moment that he could catch them. They filled the room and he closed his eyes, letting his hands fall to his sides as he listened.

He never thought that he would hear a song he recognised in Wonderland. And it felt only as real as a dream when it came to an end and he opened his eyes. He didn't know anything about the new person living upstairs, but he knew that he wanted to meet them. More than he wanted to speak to any uncarrollist, he wanted to speak to them. And maybe, in their presence, he could finally feel a sense of belonging again.

> **[** In the same way that an atom in your body cannot ask you what purpose it serves inside you, we cannot ask the universe what effect our existence has inside it, however small or seemingly insignificant. We populate a star. Stars populate a galaxy. And galaxies populate a universe. Following the sequence, our universe is likely only one of many. What lies beyond it, we can't say. But we take comfort in pretending that we can. **]**

As if to rub salt in his wounded pride, Hatt had written the grocery list on the back of his _take it this time_ note, without moving the stack of rent money even an inch. Dragging his hand down his face, he collected his scarf and gloves and shoved the list into his pocket. As he stepped outside, he saw the new neighbour standing on the platform, lining their name sticker up with the plate on the door. Though he only saw the back of their head, he could read the name very clearly.

"Lory," he noted to himself, a bit too loudly, because they suddenly looked over their shoulder. He took a breath to apologise, then choked on the air in his throat when he recognised the neighbour's face. He flashed back to the memory of stepping over him in the owl's domain, and to the memory of watching him eat butter biscuits on the floor of the Underland grocer's. He turned to Swift and gave a clumsy bow. In his stupor, Swift saw the musical notes falling again from his shoulders. Rubbing them out of his eyes, he turned to face him, and bowed back.

> **[** People have always feared what they don't know, whether it's the purpose of our existence, the nature of the universe, the sides of themselves a person doesn't show you, or a sound in the dark. So we look for ways to simplify everything and explain everything, even in ways don't make sense. Certainly, over thousands of years religions have changed, cultures have changed, politics have changed, and things that we accepted as unchanging - the laws of physics - even they have changed. But have the things that make us people changed? No. We still invent, make art, and look for meaning. Even after billions of years, have the things that make us living creatures changed? No. We still live, reproduce, and die, the way life on earth always has. Will we ever change? I don't know. I realise now that it's a question too big for me. If I have understood anything since I woke up in Wonderland, it's the extent of how much I never understood before, and how much I will never understand. **]**

✻✻✻

Hatt knelt in the grass, picking the wilting autumn flowers and collecting them in his hands - white, lilac, red, gold. He climbed the hill with his bouquet, and looked over the edge of the cliff. Waves crashed on the rocks as a cold wind swept the shore. When the sea had calmed again, he let the flowers down, watching as they flitted away and scattered above the shadow in the water. He stepped back from the edge and started down the hill. 

The first snow began to fall as he weaved through the trees, leaving prints in its dust. Some ways behind him, waves rolled over the ship, sinking the petals and carrying their colours away with the tide.


End file.
